To make it worse, too, if I didn't send the thing home without charge!-- Luke going with it, for he was back at home now keeping my books, being grown into a fine young fellow of five-and-twenty; and I sat and growled the whole of the rest of the day, calling myself all the weak-minded idiots under the sun, and telling the wife that business was going to the dogs, and I should be ruined. "You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Tom," she said. "So I am," says I. "I didn't think I could be such a fool." "Such a fool as to do a good kind action to one who was evidently a lady born, and come down in the world!" "Yes," I says, "to living in Bennett's Place, where I've sunk no less than ten machines in five years." "Yes," says the wife, "and cleared hundreds of pounds. Tom, I'm ashamed of you--you a man with twenty workmen busy upstairs, a couple of thousand pounds' worth of stock, and in the bank--" "Hold your tongue, will you!" I said roughly, and went out into the shop to try and work it all off. Luke came back just after, looking very strange, and I was at him directly. "Where's the seven and six," I said, angrily. He didn't answer, but put three half-crowns down on the desk, took out the book, made his entries--date of delivery, first payment, when the other's due, and all the rest of it--and was then going into the house. "Mind," I says, sharply, "those payments are to be kept up to the day; and to-morrow you go to Rollys, who live nearly opposite to 'em, and tell 'em to keep an eye on the widow, or we shall lose another machine." "You needn't be afraid, father," he says coldly; "they're honest enough, only poor." I was just in that humour that I wanted to quarrel with somebody, and that did it. "When I ask you for your opinion, young man, you give it me; and when I tell you to do a thing, you do it," I says, in as savage a way as ever I spoke to the lad. "You go over to-morrow and tell Rollys to keep a strict look-out on those people--do you hear?" "Father," he says, looking me full in the face, "I couldn't insult them by doing such a thing," when without another word he walked quietly out of the shop, leaving me worse than ever. For that boy had never spoken to me like that before, and I should have gone after him feeling mad like, only some people came in, and I didn't see him again till evening, and a good thing too, for I'm sure I should have said all sorts of things to the boy, that I should have been sorry for after. And there I was fuming and fretting about, savage with everybody, giving short answers, snapping at the wife, and feeling as a man does feel when he knows that he has been in the wrong and hasn't the heart to go and own it.