This was true. It had somehow chanced that they had never met at the house. Perhaps Rachel Ffrench knew why. She had found Broxton dull enough to give her an interest in any novelty of emotion or experience. She disliked the ugly town, with its population of hard-worked and unpicturesque people. She hated the quiet, well regulated, well-bred county families with candor and vivacity. She had no hesitation in announcing her distaste and weariness. "I detest them all," she once said calmly to Murdoch. "I detest them." She made the best of the opportunities for enlivenment which lay within her grasp. She was not averse to Haworth's presenting himself again and again, sitting in restless misery in the room with her, watching her every movement, drinking in her voice, struggling to hold himself in check, and failing and growing sullen and silent, and going away, carrying his wretchedness with him. She never encouraged him to advance by any word or look, but he always returned again, to go through the same self-torture and humiliation, and she always knew he would. She even derived some unexciting entertainment from her father's plans for the future. He had already new methods and processes to discuss. He had a fancy for establishing a bank in the town, and argued the advisability of the scheme with much fervor and brilliancy. Without a bank in which the "hands" could deposit their earnings, and which should make the town a sort of center, and add importance to its business ventures, Broxton was nothing. The place was growing, and the people of the surrounding villages were drawn toward it when they had business to transact. They were beginning to buy and sell in its market, and to look to its increasing population for support. The farmers would deposit their funds, the shop-keepers theirs, the "hands" would follow their example, and in all likelihood it would prove, in the end, a gigantic success. Haworth met his enthusiasms with stolid indifference. Sometimes he did not listen at all, sometimes he laughed a short, heavy laugh, sometimes he flung him off with a rough speech. But in spite of this, there were changes gradually made in the Works,--trifling changes, of which Haworth was either not conscious, or which he disdained to notice. He lost something of his old masterful thoroughness; he was less regular in his business habits; he was prone to be tyrannical by fits and starts. "Go to Ffrench," he said, roughly, to one of the "hands," on one occasion: and though before he had reached the door he was called back, the man did not forget the incident. Miss Ffrench looked on at all of this with a great deal of interest. "He does not care for the place as he did," she said to Murdoch. "He does not like to share his power with another man. It is a nightmare to him."