"Ah, Mister Aleck, be reasonable! We got to live. Down at Richardson's mill they 're gi'en the third raise. And at the United--" "Now, listen to me, men," he roared like a maddened bull. "You 've got to make a choice. Either get on with what you have, or I 'll close the mill. I swear to my God I 'll close the mill." "We 've got to live," the men said sullenly. An old workman stepped out. "Mister Aleck," he pleaded, "I 've worked for your da all my life, and I was a wee nipper when your grandfa'er was here. I mind him well. You 've got neither chick nor child, and if you have n't, the mill goes wi' you--" Good God! So it did. He had never thought of that. "--so it is n't as though you wanted the money--" "I will not!" One part of his brain formulated the reply and his lips uttered it. The other part was busy on this new discovery, that with him the mills died. Of course they did. "Well, then, be damned to you! Close your mill!" "Be damned to the whole lot of you! Take your week's notice from the day. Saturday week the mill closes, and I swear to my God it never opens again." Why should it, he asked himself when they were gone, why should it? He sat back after they had left him and for an instant the magnitude of the thought that there would be no successor shook him physically, left him all of a tremble. He had never thought of it before, incredible as that may seem. "No! There'll be no other. I'm the last." He lighted a match to put to his pipe, but he let it go out. "I 'm the last." All his life, at this moment, seemed shattered--the comfortable running order of it junked into a grotesque and cold puzzle, as a complicated engine will be ruined by a thunderbolt. The mills were gone, for he would not give in to any raise, and Jeanie Lindsay too--she was so much to him, so much that she obtruded herself on every thought he had. For the first time in his existence, sitting on the ruin, it occurred to him after all what a poor thing this complicated mechanism had been. He could remember his boyhood, a drear Sabbatical term of years, spent with a bearded father and a thin, acidulous mother. At school he had not been liked. "It was no' so pleasant, now that I come to think of it." And he was supposed to approach a strict spinster in marriage, that the destiny of the Robertsons should be accomplished; to be intimate with a frigid stranger, that another lonely and not-liked boy would be brought into the world, between a dour father and a mother of marked gentility, in a house that was cold no matter how warm the summer, and dark though the sun shone. "I will not!" The face of the Lindsay girl came between him and the tepid vision he had conjured, as in some motion-picture device. And he saw her warmth and bonniness, her slow laughter, her calm eyes. Why, under God's name, must she be born in a region where the Robertson tradition did not pick? Why must she be so desirable, and eligible wives so insipid?