"Yes, Miss Dorothy, my heart misgives me about this slumbering giant. I doubt the strength of his chains. See here"--and he led toward the centre of the embankment. "Where we stand the surface is nearly a yard lower than the mouth of the culvert." "What's the culvert for?" asked Dorothy. "It is the safety valve of the reservoir." "I'm afraid I'm rather stupid." "You see, when the reservoir gets over full the excess should go down the culvert. As things are it would begin to overflow just where we stand. Indeed, more than once when the wind has set this way, I've seen the water trickle over here. Let that trickle be but continuous and a rill would become a gap, the gap a yawning aperture and this huge burthen of Nature's most innocent fluid would hurl itself down the valley, and what or who could withstand it!" "But, Tom, whose duty is it to see to these things?" "The Commissioners. Your uncle is one of them." "Oh! I will speak to him, I promise you, and that right urgently. Would you, could you speak instead of me? Uncle is very wroth with me these days, and, oh! Tom, life is so dree at Wilberlee, I could find it in my heart at times to cry my very eyes out. And it's all your fault." "_My_ fault!" he repeated. "Yes, yours, Tom why couldn't you let uncle alone with your horrid law. You know he will have his own way, and, I think, your having been his apprentice makes it more galling." "And a workhouse brat at that," said Tom, bitterly. "Oh! never think of that, Tom. No one does. I don't, and I don't care if I do. It isn't that: but uncle cannot bear to be thwarted. Can't you let it drop?" "Faith, I'd only be too glad. But it is Mr. Tinker that attacked me, and there is only one way to stop the law that I know of. Your uncle must give the word. But he wont, and I can't." "Couldn't you just let him have his own way; it will please him, and it won't hurt you, nor your precious Co-op either." "I don't know what you call hurting me: it will just ruin me, and what's worse it will ruin a dozen others or so, poor Ben Garside among them." "But couldn't you go lower down the stream? Mr. Sy---, I mean somebody,... I mean" and here Dorothy lost herself altogether, and stood dumb-founded. But Tom's mind had seized upon the first suggestion of her words and he was unconscious of her embarrassment. "Yes, if some good fairy would transport Co-op Mill below Wilberlee, we might manage very well. Say we had that carpet we read of in the _Arabian Nights_. But what's the use of talking? I cannot stop the litigation, and your uncle wont." "Couldn't you allow him the name of a victory if he promised to let things go on just as they were, and you had nothing to pay those greedy lawyers? I'm sure he is not an unreasonable man, only you've crossed him, somehow, Tom." "I couldn't send him more water or power if I tried, I know that."