Guiting that warm May evening. He had
a good deal to think over, for he had come to a momentous decision. When
he thought of Meg as he had just seen her--small and tremulous and
tearful--he clenched his big hands and made a sound in his throat not
unlike William's growl. When he pictured her angry onslaught upon
William, he laughed. But the outcome of his reflections was this--that
whether in the past she had really done anything that put her in Walter
Brooke's power, or whether he was right to trust to that intangible
quality in her that seemed to give the direct lie to the worst of Mrs.
Trent's story, Meg appeared to him to stand in need of some hefty chap
as a buffer between her and the hard world, and he was very desirous of
being that same for Meg.

His grandfather, "Mutton-Pie Middleton," had married one of his own
waitresses for no other reason than that he found she was "the lass for
him"--and he might, so the Doncaster folk thought, have looked a good
deal higher for a wife, for he was a "warm" man at the time. Miles
strongly resembled his grandfather. He was somewhat ruefully aware that
in appearance there was but little of the Keills about him. He could
just remember the colossal old man who must have weighed over twenty
stone in his old age, and Miles, hitherto, had refused to buy a motor
for his own use because he knew that if he was to keep his figure he
must walk, and walk a lot.

Like his grandfather, he was now perfectly sure of himself; Meg "was the
lass for him"; but he was by no means equally sure of her. By some
infallible delicacy of instinct--and this he certainly did not get from
the Middletons--he knew that what the world would regard as a
magnificent match for Meg, might be the very circumstance that would
destroy his chance with her. The Middletons were all keenly alive to the
purchasing powers of money, and saw to it that they got their money's
worth.

All the same, a man's a man, whether he be rich or poor, and Miles still
remembered the way Meg had smiled upon him the first time they ever met.
Surely she could never have smiled at him like that unless she had
rather liked him.

It was the pathos of Meg herself--not the fact that she had to
work--that appealed to Miles. That she should cheerfully earn her own
living instead of grousing in idleness in a meagre home seemed to him
merely a matter of common sense. He knew that if he had to do it he
could earn his, and the one thing he could