of Dorset.' You see one does not obtain
much help here--no encouragement. Not that I expect it. We men of
letters have to choose between being hermits, or humbugs."

"I always thought a hermit was a humbug," said Jenny, smiling for the
first time.

"Not always. When I say 'hermit,' I mean 'recluse.' With all the will to
be a social success and identify myself with the welfare of the place in
which I dwell, my powers are circumscribed. Do not think I put myself
above the people, or pretend any intellectual superiority, or any
nonsense of that sort. No, it is merely a question of time and energy.
My antiquarian work demands both, and so I am deprived by duty from
mixing in the social life as much as I wish. This is not, perhaps,
understood, and so I get a character for aloofness, which is not wholly
deserved."

"Don't worry," said Miss Ironsyde. "Everybody cares for you. People
don't think about us and our doings half as much as we are prone to
fancy. I liked your last article in the _Bridport Gazette_. Only I
seemed to have read most of it before."

"Probably you have. The facts, of course, were common property. My task
is to collect data and retail them in a luminous and illuminating way."

"So you do--so you do."

He looked away, where Daniel stood by himself with his hands in his
pockets and his eyes on the river.

"A great responsibility for one so young; but he will rise to it."

"D'you mean his brother, or the Mill?"

"Both," answered Ernest Churchouse. "Both."

Mrs. Dinnett came down the garden.

"The mourning coach is at the door," she said.

"Daniel insisted that we went home in a mourning coach," explained Miss
Ironsyde. "He felt the funeral was not ended until we returned home.
That shows imagination, so you can't say he hasn't got any."

"You can never say anybody hasn't got anything," declared Mr.
Churchouse. "Human nature defeats all calculations. The wisest only
generalise about it."

CHAPTER II

AT 'THE TIGER'

The municipal borough of Bridport stretches itself luxuriously from east
to west beneath a wooded hill. Southward the land slopes to broad
water-meadows where rivers meet and Brit and Asker wind to the sea.
Evidences of the great local industry are not immediately apparent; but
streamers and wisps of steam scattered above the red-tiled roofs tell of
work, and westward, where the land falls, there stand shoulder to
shoulder the busy mills.

From single yarn that a chil