t air
dancing over the white-hot bars as his too. The whole sulphurous
prospect, once a green pasture, had long been his to all intents and
purposes, and no second soul would ever take his pride in it; to his
children it would never be more than the means of livelihood; and how had
it repaid even him for a life's devotion? With a house of sorrow in the
next valley! With a stricken wife, and sons whose right hands kept their
cunning for the cricket-field, and one of whom the very thought had become
a sudden madness!

Yet he could think of nothing else, except his wife, even in the great
green car that whisked him westward in a dancing cloud of dust; for he did
not drive himself, and the rush through the iced fragrance of the summer's
day was a mental stimulant that did its work only too well. Now it
recalled the ailing infancy of the missing boy--bronchitis it had been in
the early stages--and how his mother had taken him to Hastings three
successive winters, and wrapped him up far too much. Old family jokes
cropped up in a new light, dimming the eyes without an instant's warning.
On one of those flittings south the solicitous mother had placed the
uncomplaining child on a footwarmer, and forgotten him until a cascade of
perspiration apprised her of the effect: poor Mr. Upton had never thought
of the incident without laughter, until to-day. Without doubt she had
coddled him, and all for this, and she herself too ill to hear a word
about it!

His mind harked back to his wife. In her sad case there was no
uncertainty. He thought of thirty years ago when he had seen her first.
There had been drama and colour in their meeting; the most celebrated of
the neighbouring packs had run a fox to earth on his works, indeed in his
very slag-heap! The author of cancerous furnaces in the green heart of a
grass country had never been a popular personage with the hunting folk;
but he was master of the situation that memorable day. It was his terrier
that went into the slag-heap like a ferret, and came out bloody with a
moribund fox; his pocket-knife that shore through the brush, his hand that
presented it across the wall to the only young lady in at the death. The
men in pink looking over, the hunt servants with their work cut out on the
other side, the tongue of molten slag sticking out of the furnace
mouth--the momentary contact of the industrial and the sporting world--it
was that strange and yet significant scene which ha