THERE were those in Mawm who said that with the death of his child Inman experienced a change of heart, but what really happened was that he seized the occasion when the sympathies of his neighbours were yet warm towards him to ingratiate himself with them by an appearance of thankfulness and goodwill. He was, as the clear-sighted detective had decided, a superb actor; and he was quick to perceive that in this misfortune there was a providential opportunity for the display of his gifts, and that it had come in the nick of time to restore him to the favour of the community. For the community as a body of people he cared not one jot, it was for customers, and for them only, that he played his part. For their sake—that is to say for his own—he composed his features, whenever he was likely to be observed, into an expression of resigned melancholy, that served its purpose with an unemotional but not unkindly people, who admired, too, the way in which he put aside his personal sorrow and interested himself in their business affairs. It was the same in the workshop and in the home. If some subliminal sense kept Frank and the rest from liking him, they began to recognise his good qualities, and found life under his stern but orderly mastership a good deal more tolerable than it had been with the looser administration of Baldwin. Instinctively each man felt that the business was going to prosper, and that though he was only a cog in the machine he would be well cared for because the cog was an essential part of the whole. In the home Keturah suddenly found the roughness smoothed out of the hard voice, and herself addressed in kindlier fashion than she had experienced since Nancy’s marriage. Could she be blamed, if she thanked the impersonal and hazy being who stood for her God, that the child had been “ta’en?” After all, at her time of life, children running about the house and “mucking it up” were a scarcely tolerable nuisance. Altogether then, the first two weeks of February saw Inman’s position strengthened. Unemotional themselves, the villagers were favourably disposed towards a man who could “sup his gruel and say nowt.” The more fickle remembered that Baldwin had always been a cross-grained and surly fellow, and told themselves that he might have given Inman more cause for resentment than outsiders could be aware of. It was with Inman as with Gordel, when thin watery mists soften the cragged outlines and veil its threatening features—he was no longer “fearsome” and forbidding: he was even attractive in his own way. There were those who held contrary opinions: stubborn souls who refused to trim their sails to the prevailing breeze and continued to regard Inman with a suspicion they could not justify; but there was one who knew the truth: who knew that if the man’s heart was changed it was not the angels who had cause to rejoice.