Mrs. Dixon, like a faithful and loyal wife, had aided and abetted him in his praiseworthy efforts to get on in the world. They had succeeded in their aim, and were respected and looked up to by all who knew them. He was vicar’s warden, an overseer of the poor, one of the best-known men in public and parochial affairs in all the district. He could afford to send his daughter to school, to keep her out of the shop; to dress her ‘stylishly,’ as they called it; to give her a piano, and buy pieces of music for her to play upon it; and all these things he did with a good grace, and looked to Ada to form an alliance which should be to the credit of the family and her own glory. There were other well-to-do tradesmen in Bradstane, and many who were but ill-to-do. There was the lawyer, Mr. Coningsby, who lived not far away from the Langstroths; there was Dr. Rowntree; there was the vicar, Mr. Johnson, with Mrs. Johnson, his wife, and their numerous progeny. They lived in an old brown house, in a kind of close, near the church, with a walled garden containing apricot and plum trees. Other religious bodies were represented by two dissenting ministers and their flocks, and by a Friends’ Meeting, the head and front of which was Dr. Rowntree. These denominations, of course, had churches and chapels in which they worshipped. There were some curious old houses in the main street, and there was a long and unlovely thoroughfare called Bridge Street, more like a slum than anything else, where the women were pale, and the children stunted, and the inhabitants of which, taken all in all, did not enjoy the best of reputations. One side of this street was built to the river-bank overhanging the stream; and in the spring and autumn, or when thunderstorms prevailed, the lower rooms of those houses would be flooded. Going along Bridge Street, one did not guess how near the river one was, till one came upon an opening here and there—a gully, or a tunnel, or a narrow, dark passage—and looking down it, one could see the rushing brown waters flowing ceaselessly on, without haste and without rest, from the fastnesses whence they had sprung— ‘Where Tees in tumult leaves his source, Thundering o’er Cauldron and High Force.’ Such was, superficially, the outward aspect of Bradstane town, when Otho Askam and the two Langstroths met after their many years’ separation; such it had been for years back. It is not what is called ‘a growing town,’ and whatever drama might be played within its precincts, its exterior, objective side, was not likely to change very much. CHAPTER III LANGSTROTH’S FOLLY