He met Reuben at the door. “Father,” he said, “there is something you must let me say at once. My mother joined our hands last night. May we forget what passed between us earlier? May we remember only that she joined our hands last night, and that they will remain joined?” “I hope they will,” said Reuben, not quite certain of him yet. “The man who killed her came from the factory. I should like your permission to omit my last term at Oxford. I want very deeply to begin immediately at the factory.” His voice rose uncontrollably. “‘Drive or be driven,’ sir, you said the other day. And by God, I’ll drive. I’ll drive. That blackguard came from there.” “Come with me after breakfast,” Reuben said, shaking the hand of his heir. And in that spirit Edward went to Hepplestall’s to begin his education. Dorothy had died happy in the bright certainty of her authentic moment! PART II CHAPTER I--THE SERVICE IF there is a man whose job I’ve never envied, it’s the A Prince of Wales,” groaned Rupert Hepplestall, looking in his mirror with an air of cynical boredom and fastening white linen round a bronzed neck. “And I’m going to get the taste of it to-day.” The point was that it was Rupert’s sixteenth birthday, and the sixteenth birthday of a Hepplestall was an occasion of such moment that he had been brought back from Harrow to spend that day at home. On their sixteenth birthdays, the Hepplestall boys, and some others who were favored though only their mothers were Hepplestalls, were received in the office and from thence escorted through the mills by the Head of the Firm with as much ceremonious aplomb as if they were Chinese mandarins, Argentine financiers, Wall Street magnates, Russian nobles, German professors or any of the miscellaneous but always distinguished foreigners, who, visiting Lancashire, procured invitations: to inspect that jewel in its crown, the mills at Staithley Bridge. For the boys it was the formal ritual of initiation into the service of the firm. A coming of age was nothing if not anti-climactic to the sixteenth birthday of a Hepplestall. Not all Hepplestalls were chosen; there were black sheep in every flock, but if a Hepplestall meant to go black, he was expected to show symptoms early and in Rupert’s case, at any rate, there was no question of choice. Rupert was the eldest son. He would return to school, he would go to a university, but to-day he set foot in the mills, and the step was final. The Service would have marked him for its own.