courage to speak for some time.

"Don't let him go without a glass of wine," he muttered to the young
lady. "I give you my honor I haven't got food across his lips for"--

She started away from him, and made the machinist drink to the success
of "our engine," as she called it; but he only touched the glass to his
lips and smiled at her faintly: then left the room with her uncle.

The dog followed him: he had kept by Starke since the moment he came
into the breakfast-room, cuddling down across his feet when he was
called away. The man had only patted him absently, saying that all dogs
did so with him, he didn't know why. Thor followed him now. Friend
Turner beckoned the clergyman back a moment.

"Make him talk, Richard. Be rough, hurt him, if thee chooses; it will be
a safety-valve. Look in his eyes! I tell thee we have no idea of all
that has brought this poor creature into this state,--such rigid strain.
But if it is broken in on first by the failure of his pump, if it be a
pump, I will not answer for the result, Richard."

Dr. Bowdler nodded abruptly, and hurried after Starke. When he entered
the cozy south room which he called the library, he found Starke
standing before an oil-painting of a baby, one the Doctor had lost years
ago.

"Such a bright little thing!" the man said, patting the chubby bare foot
as if it were alive.

"You have children?" Dr. Bowdler asked eagerly.

"No, but I know almost all I meet in the street, or they know me. 'Uncle
Joe' they call me,"--with a boyish laugh.

It was gone in a moment.

"Are they ready?"

"No."

The Doctor hesitated. The man beside him was gray-haired as himself, a
man of power, with a high, sincere purpose looking out of the haggard
scraggy face and mild blue eyes,--how could he presume to advise him?
Yet this Starke, he saw, had narrowed his life down to a point beyond
which lay madness; and that baby had not been in life more helpless or
solitary or unable than he was now, when the trial had come. The Doctor
caught the bony hands in his own fat healthy ones.

"I wish I could help you," he said impetuously.

Starke looked in his face keenly.

"For what? How?"

"This engine--have you nothing to care for in life but that?"

"Nothing,--nothing but that and what it will gain me."

There was a pause.

"If it fails?"

The dark blood dyed the man's face and throat; he choked, waited a
moment before he spoke.

"It would not hurt me. No. I'm nearly tir