"Good night, Paul," she said at length. "You will write me often, won't you? Remember, you are the only thing I love on earth." "You know what I will do," he replied. "Good night, mother." For a few seconds he held her like a man might hold the maid he loved, and then, turning, he walked slowly back towards Bodmin, from which town he intended to take the train to the place where he lived. Mile after mile he walked, seeming to take no notice of his surroundings. It might be day, it might be night; it might be summer, it might be winter, for all he cared. The iron had entered his soul, the poison of hatred had filled his heart. He loved his mother with a kind of savage, passionate love, but the man who was his father he hated, and on him he swore to be revenged. "That is my work in life," he said to himself; "that is the purpose for which I shall live, and I will do it--yes, I will do it." CHAPTER II PAUL BEGINS HIS WORK In some senses Paul Stepaside had suffered but little because of his being a pauper. His education was quite equal to that of the lads who had gone to the elementary school in the district. He had passed what was called the sixth standard, and although this meant very little more than a knowledge of the three "r's," he was considered by the workhouse schoolmaster as his cleverest pupil. After leaving school at the age of fourteen he was apprenticed to a local blacksmith, with whom it was arranged he should remain for four years. John Tresidder, the blacksmith, however, died two years after Paul's apprenticeship, and so at sixteen, with his trade half learned, he found himself homeless and friendless. But that did not trouble him much. He knew, or, at least, he thought he knew, practically all that Tresidder could teach him, and he was eager to start life on his own account. During the two years he had been an apprentice, moreover, he had attended a night-school, and had studied subjects which were beyond the range of the curriculum in the ordinary day-schools. He had some knowledge of geometry, and had mastered the first book of Euclid. He also knew a little of history, and the schoolmaster, having some acquaintance with chemistry, and finding Paul an apt pupil, had given him some lessons in that science. Being a strong, healthy lad, he had no difficulty in finding work in the blacksmith's shop at the Pencarrow Mines, where he was called an Improver. He had been working here for a year, and, as he had told his mother, his wages had just been raised to one pound a week.