knaw summut else, Mr.
Cowles?'

'Something else to do, you fool! What could you do--run the engine? tend
the planers? If I wanted you at all, I should keep you where you were.'

He moved off at this. Adam seated himself on the familiar cinder heaps
and grieved in his simple way, for a time feeling almost bitter.

Little Nobby's deformity was one of the strange things that made Adam
think. Several years before, he had the child with him at the factory
one night, just old enough to walk a little. In Adam's momentary absence
the boy managed to get upon a box near one of the furnace doors, and,
rolling against the blistering iron, was horribly burned; yet
unaccountably he did not die, but grew bent into a scarred, shapeless
body, though his face was a sweet, childish one, innocent of fire.
Nobby, as Adam called him after that, was a silent preacher to the
stoker. When a clergyman asked him once if he was a Christian, he
pointed to Nobby's back:

'I knaw there's a Lord,' he said,' or else Nobby'd died, burnt so sore
thet way; an' I knaw He's good, or Nobby'd been a fool a'terward, like
children thet burn theirsel's. Saved Nobby from dyin' an' from bein'
worse nor dead, both, Lord meant him good.'

The boy was Adam Craig's grandson. His firstborn, Tom, was wild, and
went to sea--the old story--leaving wife and unborn child for his father
to look to. Six years had gone--the seventh began at New Year's; the boy
was born, burnt, saved alive, and not idiotic; its mother had died;
Adam's life was outrunning the child's, and he would soon have to leave
it to go on by itself; but his faith in his son's return never shook.

'Him'll come back,' he would say, simply, and in perfect confidence, 'I
knaw't well. Lord never burnt Nobby for nawt. Him's nawt dead; him'll
come back some time, I knaw.'

III.

Adam went back at noon, and found something else to take his thoughts:
Nobby was in his pains--a sad remnant of his terrible mishap. These were
irregular, and he had been free for several months, but he had been
exposed to the cold to-day. There was little to be done. At such times
Adam could only cry over him, hold him in his arms while he was twisting
his crooked body so that it would hardly stay in or upon anything, and
say:

'Poor, poor Nobby. Him'll nawt die, Katry; but how can he live? Lord
send back Tom!'

Jane was busy somewhere, and did not come home till evening. Her father
had been turned out of his place; Nobby