For at this moment he felt that he had it in him to work miracles. The greatest things seemed easy. The fortunes of Ovington’s lay in the future, the cycle half turned—to what a point might they not carry them! During the last twelve months he had seen money earned with an ease which made all things appear possible; and alert, eager, sanguine, with an inborn talent for business, he felt that he had but to rise with the flowing tide to reach any position which wealth could offer in the coming age—that age which enterprise and industry, the loan, the mill, the furnace were to make their own. The age of gold! He burst into song. He stopped. “Betty!” he cried. “Who is that rude boy?” the girl retorted, appearing on the stairs above him. He bowed with ceremony, his hand on his heart, his eyes dancing. “You see before you the Industrious Apprentice!” he said. “He has received the commendation of his master. It remains only that he should lay his success at the feet of—his master’s daughter!” She blushed, despite herself. “How silly you are!” she cried. But when he set his foot on the lowest stair as if to join her, she fled nimbly up and escaped. On the landing above she stood. “Congratulations, sir,” she said, looking over the balusters. “But a little less forwardness and a little more modesty, if you please! It was not in your articles that you should call me Betty.” “They are cancelled! They are gone!” he retorted. “Come down, Betty! Come down and I will tell you such things!” But she only made a mocking face at him and vanished. A moment later her voice broke forth somewhere in the upper part of the house. She, too, was singing. CHAPTER VI Between the village and Garth the fields sank gently, to rise again to the clump of beeches which masked the house. On the farther side the ground fell more sharply into the narrow valley over which the Squire’s window looked, and which separated the knoll whereon Garth stood from the cliffs. Beyond the brook that babbled down this valley and turned the mill rose, first, a meadow or two, and then the Thirty Acre covert, a tangle of birches and mountain-ashes which climbed to the foot of the rock-wall. Over this green trough, which up-stream and down merged in the broad vale, an air of peace, of remoteness and seclusion brooded, making it the delight of those who, morning and evening, looked down on it from the house. Viewed from the other side, from the cliffs, the scene made a different impression. Not the intervening valley but the house held the eye. It was not large, but the knoll on which it stood was scarped on that side, and the walls of weathered brick rose straight from the rock, fortress-like and imposing, displaying all their mass. The gables and the stacks of fluted chimneys dated only from Dutch William, but tradition had it that a strong place, Castell Coch, had once stood on the same site; and fragments of pointed windows and Gothic work, built into the walls, bore out the story.