So we struck that bargain, and leaving the shop, which I have never found again, I carried the passion home and unwrapped it from the paper and put it on the table in my study. After a time, when it was accustomed to its new surroundings, it showed unmistakably that it wished to be friendly with me. At its age, I gathered, and in its outworn condition, it thought fit to be grateful to me for having purchased it at so great a price. The shopman was right; it was not a love passion, it was a hate passion, but superannuated now, and if I cared to watch it carefully it promised that I should see from the first all that happened: how this hate which was so very strong a hundred years ago had died and was now turned to such corruption and kindliness that, before it fell utterly to pieces, it was to show me its career. To me it seems that the story of this hate falls, like the hymns, into two parts, ancient and modern, and I think it properest to begin by telling you the ancient part first. Hates that are to live a hundred years are not born in a day, so I shall first tell you how Reuben Hepplestall turned from petty squire to cotton manufacturing and you will see later for yourselves why this hate began. HEPPLESTALL’S PART I CHAPTER I--REUBEN’S SEAL EVEN to-day a man may be a Jacobite if he likes to be a Jacobite just as he may read the Morning Post, and in the day when Reuben Hepplestall was young there was a variety of reasons for being Jacobite, though most of them were romantic and sentimental rather than practical or good sense, and Hepplestall’s reason was rank absurdity because it was absurdity unredeemed by conviction. He was Jacobite because Sir Harry Whitworth was Hanoverian, from hatred of Sir Harry, not from love of the Stuarts; but Hepplestall was young and as a general principle perversity in youth is better than perversity in age, leaving the longer time for correction. Certainly, Hepplestall’s was a risky game, which may have had attractiveness for him. He was strong, even in perversity, and having set his hand to the plow, did not rest until he found himself accepted as a power in the inner councils of the local Jacobites; but there was something nourishing to his self-importance in this furtive prominence and he savored the hazards of it not only because it marked to himself his difference from the hard drinking sportsmen of Sir Harry’s set, but as a mental exercise. He took a gambler’s risk in a gambling age, backing his vigilance against all comers, feeling that to touch the fringe of intrigue lifted him above a society which exercised its gullet more than its wits. His secret, especially a dangerous secret, flattered lus sense of superiority.