‘We possess a bit of property down there,’ Gilbert answered him. ‘It is perfectly meaningless and perfectly useless to us. It cumbers the ground, and has swallowed up a pot of money which we ought to be enjoying the benefit of now. I sometimes walk down to it, to look at it, and think what a folly it was. “Langstroth’s Folly,” it ought to be called. Townend Mills is the name it actually bears. There it is!’ as the moon shone out brightly for a few minutes, and showed the dark mass of the factories rising almost directly in front of them. ‘You’re a queer one!’ said Otho, not without a kind of admiration in his tones. ‘Where’s the sense of fretting yourself by coming and looking at it? It’s like trying to heal a raw by scraping.’ ‘Your simile would be just, if I did irritate myself,’ replied Gilbert, gently. ‘My dear Otho’—he spoke impressively, and laid his hand for a moment on the other’s arm—‘I never let anything irritate me. I make it a rule——’ ‘Never—I never say never,’ said Otho. ‘No saying what will turn up. Leave it to chance. That’s the best way. Besides, Mag—some one was saying to me, only the other day, that it’s only very young people who _never_ do what they oughtn’t.’ It was on the tip of Gilbert’s tongue to say, ‘I know I am young, but, then, I have taken care to be very wise, too,’ because we are apt to blurt out the thoughts nearest our hearts. But he said quietly— ‘Yes, I know I am young, but I have had a good deal to do that generally falls to older people. With Michael choosing to leave us and take his own way, I have had a good deal to think about, and a good deal of help to give to my poor governor in his business affairs; and I soon found that, if you want to get on at all in business, you _must_ keep your temper, especially when you are a poor man, with fallen fortunes, against the world——’ ‘Be hanged if I could ever keep my temper about business, or anything else that went wrong with me!’ ‘Ah, you can afford to lose your temper,’ said Gilbert, in a cold voice, which caused Otho hastily to say that he had meant no offence; and Gilbert proceeded— ‘So, as I say, I don’t let the Townend Mills irritate me, though one might get irritated enough about them if one would; but I come and smoke my pipe, and walk round them now and again, and think quietly. I feel as if I might, some time or other, have a good idea on the subject, you know—an idea that might be worked into something. Don’t you trouble yourself about them. I won’t detain you long. Here we are!’ They had entered the long, narrow passage between the mills. It was now late, getting near ten o’clock, for they had not left the Red Gables till after nine. The clouded sky made the night darker—a darkness which was deepened, if anything, by the occasional gleams of moonlight when the rack parted. At the end of the passage there was visible a kind of gray shimmer, and in the intervals between the gusts of wind they could hear the rush of the river.