‘What will become of my work,’ he asked himself, as he often had asked himself lately, ‘if my father were to die, as he might, any day? If he were to die, and everything were to be divided! All that I have scraped together with such toil, for so many years. One half of it as good as flung into the gutter. Where would my wages be then? Michael is not fit to have control over money which has been earned by some one else. He does not understand the subject, and never will. He would take his share, marry that girl—if she would have him—and leave me with my life to begin over again. As for the factories, if he is fool enough to listen to Sir Thomas Winthrop, and repeat what he says, as if it were something worth thinking about—why, if he can do that, he is capable of following out Sir Thomas’s ideas too. It is enough to disgust any man, and discourage him from anything like real work,’ Gilbert went on to himself, ‘to think he has so precarious a hold as I have upon things which would not be existing now, but for his devotion. One ought to have some more secure prospect, if only to give one a little heart in one’s exertions.’ Long after they had parted and gone their separate ways, Gilbert was silent, revolving this problem in his mind; and the more he thought about it, the bigger and uglier it grew. ‘Michael cares for nothing but to gratify his own wishes and impulses,’ Gilbert thought, darkly, feeling that this tendency of Michael’s interfered disagreeably with certain plans and projects of his own, which he did not recognise as proceeding from the same source. After that, the conversations between them on such matters grew ever rarer and less expansive. Michael did not dwell on the matter, and, if he had thought about it, would have been too proud to allude to it after Gilbert had asked him whether he trusted him; and something, whether pride or another feeling, hindered Gilbert from opening out. Every day he grew more sedate, and his brow became grayer and more covered with its network of little fine wrinkles. CHAPTER VI GILBERT’S ‘COUP DE THEATRE’ Towards the end of every hunting season, those men in Bradstane and its vicinity who belonged to the institution known as the Tees Valley Hunt, were in the habit of meeting at the King’s Arms in Bradstane, and there partaking together of a luncheon, at which Sir Thomas Winthrop, the master, presided, and after which he read out the statistics of the past season, and laid before the assembled company any proposed new arrangements for the following year. Nothing was decided then; a regular meeting was called, to be held a week later, in which the affairs were discussed in earnest, and real business was done. It had come to pass with the lapse of years, that the gathering had become a very sociable one, dear to the hearts of those who partook in it; and they would not have given it up on any account.