“The gun! The gun!” Barraclough placed it in his hands without a word and John turned with it and was gone. The canny Barraclough, taking his precautions in case the worst (or the best) happened, slept that night in a public-house midway between Needham’s and Hepplestall’s. He had made himself pleasant to several passers-by on the road; he had asked them the time; he had established his alibi. CHAPTER X--DOROTHY’S MOMENT WHEN Edward came home on the day of his introduction to the factory, Dorothy met him with an anxious, “Well, Edward?” and, “Oh, Mother,” he had said, “I have to think of this. Pray do not ask me now.” That was all and, if she liked, she could consider herself snubbed for attempting an unwomanly inquisitiveness into the affairs of men, but he intended no snub nor did she interpret him as side-tracking her. It was, simply, that he refused to involve Dorothy in this trouble. He might be forced to take some desperate measure--nothing more hopeful than his first thought of enlistment had yet occurred to him--and if things were to come to an ugly pass like that he wasn’t going to have his mother concerned in them. He declined the factory, and discussion would not help. Reuben felt no surprise at Edward’s silence. The boy was, no doubt, considering his situation and would come in time to the right conclusions about it; he would see that this was not a thing to be settled now, but one which had been settled twenty years ago by the fact that Edward was Reuben’s firstborn son. No: he was not anxious about Edward, with his jejune opinions, his young effervescence, his failure, from the polities of Oxford, to perceive that life was earnest. Edward wanted, did he, to play at being a lawyer: so had Reuben once played at being a Jacobite. Youth had its green sickness. But Dorothy was different: he couldn’t disembarrass himself so easily about Dorothy. They were all putting a barrier between their thoughts and their words, but marriage had not blunted, it had increased, his sensitiveness to Dorothy’s moods, and he was aware that she was troubled now more deeply than he had ever known her moved before. She seemed to him to be badly missing the just perspective, to be making a mountain of a mole-hill, to be making tragedy out of the commonplace comedy of ingenuous youth, to be too much the mother and too little the wife, to be, by unique exception, unreasonable: but all this counted for nothing with him when Dorothy was pained. Yet he couldn’t, in justice, blame Edward as first cause of her grief when the cause was not Edward, or Edward’s youth, but the universal malady of youth. He reminded himself again of that fantastic folly of his own youth, Jacobitism, and it was notably forebearing in him to remember it now and to decide that his own green sickness had been less excusable than Edward’s.