The next morning she expressed a desire to spend a few months with her brother in California. “I coughed all last winter, after I had the flu,” she explained, “and James has been wanting me this long time. I don't want to leave you, that's all, Willy. If you were in the city it would be different.” He was frankly bewildered and a little hurt, to tell the truth. He no more suspected her of design than of crime. “Of course you are going,” he said, heartily. “It's the very thing. But I like the way you desert your little son!” “I've been thinking about that, too,” she said, pouring his coffee. “I--if you were in the city, now, there would always be something to do.” He shot her a suspicious glance, but her face was without evidence of guile. “What would I do in the city?” “They use chemists in the mills, don't they?” “A fat chance I'd have for that sort of job,” he scoffed. “No city for me, mother.” But she knew. She read his hesitation accurately, the incredulous pause of the bird whose cage door is suddenly opened. He would go. “I'd think about it, anyhow, Willy.” But for a long time after he had gone she sat quietly rocking in her rocking chair in the bay window of the sitting room. It was a familiar attitude of hers, homely, middle-class, and in a way symbolic. Had old Anthony Cardew ever visualized so imaginative a thing as a Nemesis, he would probably have summoned a vision of a huddled figure in his stable-yard, dying, and cursing him as he died. Had Jim Doyle, cunningly plotting the overthrow of law and order, been able in his arrogance to conceive of such a thing, it might have been Anthony Cardew he saw. Neither of them, for a moment, dreamed of it as an elderly Scotch Covenanter, a plain little womanly figure, rocking in a cane-seated rocking chair, and making the great sacrifice of her life. All of which simply explains how, on a March Wednesday evening of the great year of peace after much tribulation, Mr. William Wallace Cameron, now a clerk at the Eagle Pharmacy, after an hour of Politics, and no Economics at all, happened to be taking a walk toward the Cardew house. Such pilgrimages has love taken for many years, small uncertain ramblings where the fancy leads the feet and far outstrips them, and where heart-hunger hides under various flimsy pretexts; a fine night, a paper to be bought, a dog to be exercised. Not that Willy Cameron made any excuses to himself. He had a sort of idea that if he saw the magnificence that housed her, it would through her sheer remoteness kill the misery in him. But he regarded himself with a sort of humorous pity, and having picked up a stray dog, he addressed it now and then. “Even a cat can look at a king,” he said once. And again, following some vague train of thought, on a crowded street: “The People's voice is a queer thing. 'It is, and it is not, the voice of God.' The people's voice, old man. Only the ones that count haven't got a voice.”