He didn’t at first associate that strange significance of Hepplestall with his sense that he had brought hope with him from London. True, there was this difference between his wife’s motives and his--that she had wanted to see Dorothy married to Whitworth, and he wanted to see Dorothy married. Dorothy in any man’s home, within reason; but his was the ideal of the father who felt in her presence a cramping necessity to restraint, and, if any man’s, why should he think of Hepplestall’s in particular, when, since Sir Harry was out of the running, there was a host of sufficiently eligible young men and when now he watched his wife’s resentful glare as she looked at that unsightly chimney? It was on the tip of his tongue to tell her at once that Whitworth was not their only neighbor to be spoken of respectfully, but on second thoughts that had better wait till Dorothy was not present to hear her mother’s inevitable first pungencies. He wanted Dorothy married, and it was easy to marry her to almost any bachelor in the county; yet here was Luke Verners settling it obstinately in his mind that Hepplestall was the husband he wished for her. Hepplestall had been heard of in London, which was one wonder, and had been the subject of a serious discussion at a gaming club, which was a greater wonder, and Verners, who had helped to dig the gulf between Reuben and the county, was now considering how the gulf was to be bridged. Was steam atrocious, when it gained a man the commendation of Mr. Seccombe? He recalled Seccombe’s comparison of the factory and its surrounding cottages with the feudal chieftain’s keep, and as he looked again at Hepplestall’s creation, he saw how apt the comparison was, he saw alliance with Reuben as an astute move that might give him footing on the winning side, as, emphatically, a “deep” thing. If steam were a success, it couldn’t be an atrocity. Whether it were atrocity or not, there was no question but that steam, in Reuben’s hands, was a success. He was working with a tigerish energy that left no stone unturned in the consolidation of his position. As yet he was a monopolist of steam in the district, but that was an advantage that couldn’t last and he meant when he had to meet more up-to-date competition than that of the water-power manufacturers to be impregnably established to meet it. He hadn’t time to think of other things--such as women, or the county, or Dorothy Verners or even Phoebe Bradshaw.