So the Stewart Publishing Syndicate, which now has dashing offices near Covent Garden, came to birth and Ada got her money. When Sam tried to tell Effie that his investments outside the business were ridiculously small, she had refused to be impressed. “It’s not the means of life that matters, Sam. It’s living: it’s the quality of life: it’s what we do with life,” she said, and Ada got the means. “She’ll be married in a year to a man from Liverpool,” said Dubby, when he heard. “Why Liverpool?” asked Sam, and Dubby shrugged his shoulders. He thought Sam’s question stupid. “By the way, Sam,” Dubby said, “have you and Effie any plans?” “No,” said Effie, when Sam hesitated, but a brother’s curiosity was not to be stifled like that, and Sam’s face told her, too, how he had hung on her reply. She resented his anxiety, the proof that he had not dropped his calculating habit. They had not discussed the question of plans because she held there was no question to discuss, and Sam, she thought, deserved a little punishment for thinking otherwise. “I suppose,” she went on, “we shall stay in Manchester and face the music.” “Oh!” said Sam blankly. “Well, we must give Mr. Verity his revenge,” she teased. “But it can’t hurt me now I’m out of politics,” he said, confessing by his tone that it would hurt him very much. “It will please him, though,” she said. “I’d... I’d thought of going to America,” he ventured. “America!” scoffed Dubby. “_O sancta simplicitas!_ America’s not El Dorado, Sam. El Dorado’s been found. I’d even say it’s been found out.” “There are big things in America,” Sam defended his idea. “As a matter of fact, Dubby,” said Effie, silencing him, “we shall go to Marbeek for a little while. It’s a good place to begin from.” With that a great contentment came to Sam. They were to go to Marbeek; they were to begin; and he no longer questioned what. He made no hard and fast surrender of his will, but recognized the fact, not for the first time, that when Effie made a decision it had a shining rightness. Perhaps she had retreated from her first decision of Marbeck, but, if so, Anne helping him, he had retreated with her; and they went to Marbeek now, not to end, but to begin, and to begin together. Reflecting on it all, he could not see the blemish. He couldn’t, for the life of him, make out why Anne was not content. He half explained the valley’s failure to enchant her when he perceived that she had not really looked at it. At what, then, could she be looking? And how could she, how in the name of beauty was it possible for anyone to pick out from all that noble amphitheatre of the hills the one smoke-clouded spot? “Mother,” he cried in downright exasperation, “aren’t you happy here?”, “I’d be happier in Manchester,” she said. “Yon smoke’s too far away to taste. Aye, I think I’ll leave you here and go to-day.” “But you’re not going back to Madge’s--to the work in other people’s houses, I mean. That’s surely over now.” “Maybe.”