s an end
of it--and an end of Horace too! Horace had to suffer. He did suffer.

Perhaps it was for his highest welfare that other matters came to
monopolize his mind. One sorrow drives out another. If you sit on a pin
you are apt to forget that you have the toothache. The earthenware
manufactory was not going well. Plenty of business was being done, but
not at the right prices. Crushed between the upper and nether
millstones of the McKinley Tariff and German competition, Horace, in
company with other manufacturers, was breathing out his life's blood in
the shape of capital. The truth was that he had never had enough
capital. He had heavily mortgaged the house at Toft End in order to
purchase his partners' shares in the business and have the whole
undertaking to himself, and he profoundly regretted it. He needed every
penny that he could collect; the strictest economy was necessary if he
meant to survive the struggle. And here he was paying eight pounds a
week to a personage purely ornamental, after having squandered hundreds
in rendering that personage comfortable! The situation was dreadful.

You may ask, Why did he not explain the situation to Sidney? Well,
partly because he was too kind, and partly because he was too proud,
and partly because Sidney would not have understood. Horace fought on,
keeping up a position in the town and hoping that miracles would occur.

Then Ella's expectations were realized. Sidney and she had some twenty
thousand pounds to play with. And they played the most agreeable games.
But not in Bursley. No. They left Horace in Bursley and went to
Llandudno for a spell. Horace envied them, but he saw them off at the
station as an elder brother should, and tipped the porters.

Certainly he was relieved of the formality of paying eight pounds a
week to his brother. But this did not help him much. The sad fact was
that 'things' (by which is meant fate, circumstances, credit, and so
on) had gone too far. It was no longer a question of eight pounds a
week; it was a question of final ruin.

Surely he might have borrowed money from Sidney? Sidney had no money;
the money was Ella's, and Horace could not have brought himself to
borrow money from a woman--from Ella, from a heavenly creature who
always had a soothing sympathetic word for him. That would have been to
take advantage of Ella. No, if you suggest such a thing, you do not
know Horace.

I stated in the beginning that he had no faults. He was