Luke felt precipices gape for him; this was the road to revelations of his motives, but Reuben turned it to a harmless by-path. “So I have heard,” he said. “I was promised news of the fashions.” And fashions, and the opinions of Mrs. Verners on fashions, gently nursed to its placid end a call of which Luke had expected nothing short of catastrophe. Reuben was sedulously attentive to Mrs. Verners, wonderfully in agreement with her views, and Luke, returning from seeing him to his horse, had the unhoped for satisfaction of hearing her say, “What a pleasant young man Mr. Hepplestall is, after all.” He took time by the forelock then. “His enterprise,” he said, “is the talk of the London clubs. We have not been seeing what lies beneath our noses. They think much of Hepplestall in London. They watch him with approval.” “I confess I like the way his hair grows,” said Mrs. Verners, and Dorothy said nothing. While as to Reuben, there is only one word for the mood in which he rode home--that it was religious. Sincerely and reverently, he thanked his God for Dorothy Verners, and to the end he kept her in his mind as one who came to him from God. A miracle had happened--Luke was God’s instrument bringing him to that drawing-room where Dorothy was--and Reuben had a simple and a lasting faith in it. Not that in the lump it softened him, not that he wasn’t all the same a devil-worshiper of ambition and greed and hatred, for he was all these things, besides being the humbly grateful man for whom God wrought the miracle of Dorothy Verners. She was on one side, in her place apart, and the rest was as it had been. It may be that his conduct to Bradshaw resulted from this religious mood. Religion is associated with the idea of sacrifice and if the suffering was likely to be Peter’s rather than Reuben’s, Reuben sacrificed, at least, the contemptuous kindliness he felt towards Peter. His first action was to set in motion against Bradshaw the machinery by which he had crushed other small manufacturers out of trade. In those days, the power-loom had not become a serious competitor of the hand-loom and the hand-weavers chiefly worked looms standing in sheds attached to their cottages or (for humidity’s sake, not health’s) in a cellar below them; but they used by now power-spun yarn which was issued to them by the manufacturers. Reuben had permitted Peter to go on spinning in his factory: he now sent round to the weavers the message that Peter’s yarn was taboo and that if they dealt with Peter they would never deal with Hepplestall. It was enough: the weavers were implicitly Reuben’s thralls, for without his yarn they could no longer rely on supplies at all. Peter was doomed. Reuben had not even, as had been necessary at first, to go through the process of undercutting his prices; he had only to tell the weavers that Peter was banned and they had no alternative but to obey.