"Let me tell you, Mr. Folyat, that we are not rich. We are not rich, Mr. Folyat, but I have my pride. Mr. Lawrie's relations have begged me on their knees to allow them to educate my children. I have refused. My children are the children of a poor man, they must do what the children of the poor have to do. They must earn their living, and they must be made safe. I believe in safety. My two eldest sons are in the biggest and safest bank in the town, and, if they behave themselves, they will be there all their lives. My youngest is in a very good position in Messrs. Keith's warehouse, and he, too, if he behaves himself, will be there for the rest of his life. My youngest son is very foolish and volatile. I don't believe he knows his own mind. I doubt very much whether he has a mind to know. I think it best that he should stay where he is. I am glad to know that he has found friends in your house and circle, Mr. Folyat. I do not call, or I would call on Mrs. Folyat." "Mrs. Folyat would, I am sure, be . . ." Francis dropped the remark as insincere. He added hastily, to cover it up: "The boy seemed to think that his uncles would help." "I do not allow Mr. Lawrie's brothers to interfere in my affairs in any way." "Then . . ." "That is all, Mr. Folyat." Francis found himself forced to admiration of this woman. There was a sort of finality about her. He told himself that she was like a very large garden roller, a roller so heavy that no one man could move it. He had a trick of nicknaming people--(Minna had inherited it)--and he ticked her off in his mind as the garden-roller. When he had done that, he found that she was talking about the weather and Mr. Gladstone. When she had told him how she wept at the death of Charles Dickens, Francis thought it time to go. Mrs. Lawrie chatted amiably as she took him to the door, and she stood watching him as he walked down the asphalt path to the little rustic-gate. He turned down towards the bridge and took a long breath, and blew it out again. How good the sky was! How good the air upon one's face! . . . He remembered old Lawrie's verses: _The distant tolling of the bell Told the great sun a man was dead. . . ._ What was dead? Old Lawrie? Hardly. The dead were surely not so mad as that. The woman? "Dead as a doornail," said Francis, and he thought with pity of Bennett Lawrie, young, ardent, groping for life, coming back at night, tired from his dull work in his dull office, to that house. Almost unconsciously he found himself comparing it with his own house and wondering what that might be like for the young people in it--for Minna, for Annette for Frederic. Not so bad as that, surely not so bad as that. And yet . . . He would not admit to himself that all was not well in his own house. "How strange," he thought. "How strange, to walk out of the street, an ordinary street, into lives like that! One would never have imagined it. . . . But the boy, Bennett; what's to become of the boy?" XV