When Colonel and Mrs. Lewknor called at the Manor-house a few days later, Mrs. Trupp told them what had happened.

"Burt paid her rent?" queried the Colonel.

"Without her knowledge," said Mrs. Trupp.

The Colonel shrugged.

"I\'m afraid our friend Ernie\'s a poor creature," he said. "Wishy-washy! That\'s about the long and short of it."

"And yet he\'s got it in him!" commented Mrs. Trupp.

"That\'s what I say," remarked Mrs. Lewknor with a touch of aggressiveness. The little lady, with the fine loyalty that was her characteristic, never forgot whose son Ernie was, nor her first meeting with him years before in hospital at Jubbulpur. "He\'s got plenty in him; but she don\'t dig it out."

"He got a good fright though, this time," said Bess. "It may steady him."

Mr. Trupp shot forth one of his short epigrams, solid and chunky as a blow from a hammer.

"Men won\'t till they must," he said. "It\'s Must has been the making of Man. He\'ll try when he\'s got to, and not a moment before."

Ten minutes later Colonel and Mrs. Lewknor were walking down Church Street towards the station. Just in front of them a woman and two men were marching a-breast. The woman was flanked by her comrades.

"What a contrast those two men make," remarked the Colonel. "That feller Burt\'s like a bull!"

"Too like," retorted Mrs. Lewknor sharply. "Give me the fellow who\'s like a gentleman."

The Colonel shook his head.

"Flame burns too feebly."

"But it burns pure," snapped the little lady.

Both parties had reached the foot of the hill at the Goffs when the woman in front swerved. It was the motion of the bird in flight suddenly aware of a man with a gun. She passed through the stile and fled swiftly across Saffrons Croft. The men with her, evidently taken by surprise, followed.

Only the Colonel saw what had happened.

A tall man, coming from the station, had turned into Alf\'s garage.

"Royal," he said low to his companion.


Captain Royal had come down to Beachbourne to see Alf Caspar, who wanted more capital for his Syndicate which was prospering amazingly. Alf, indeed, now that he had established his garages in every important centre in East Sussex, was starting a Road-touring Syndicate to exploit for visitors the hidden treasures of a country-side amazingly rich in historic memories for men of Anglo-Saxon blood. The Syndicate was to begin operations with a flourish on the Easter Bank Holiday, if the necessary licence could be obtained from the Watch Committee; and Alf anticipated little real trouble in that matter.

Mrs. Trupp and her daughter, who had never forgiven Alf for being Alf, watched the growing prosperity of the Syndicate and its promoter with undisguised annoyance.

"It beats me," said Bess, "why people back the little beast. Everybody knows all about him."

Next day as they rode down the valley towards Birling Gap, Mr. Trupp expounded to his daughter the secret of Alf\'s success.

"When you\'re as old as I am, my dear, and have had as long an experience as I have of this slip-shod world, you\'ll know that people will forgive almost anything to a man who gets things done and is reliable. Alf drove me for nearly ten years tens of thousands of miles; and I never knew him to have a break-down on the road. Why?—because he took trouble."

Alf, indeed, with all his amazing deficiencies, mental and moral, was a supremely honest workman. He never scamped a job, and was never satisfied with anything but the best. He was gloriously work-proud. A hard master, he was hardest on himself, as all the men in his yard knew. One and all they disliked him; one and all they respected him—because he could beat them at their own job. His work was his solitary passion, and he was an artist at it. Here he was not even petty. Good work, and a good workman, found in him their most wholehearted supporter.

"That\'s a job!" he\'d say to a mechanic. "I congratulate you."

"You should know, Mr. Caspar," the man would answer, pleased and purring. For Alf\'s reputation as the best motor-engineer in East Sussex was well-established and well-earned. And because he was efficient and thorough the success of his Syndicate was never in doubt.

Alf was on the way now, in truth, to becoming a rich man. Yet he lived simply enough above his original garage in the Goffs at the foot of Old Town. And from that eyrie, busy though he was, he still made time to watch with interest and pleasure his brother\'s trousers coming down and indeed to lend a helping hand in the process: for he worked secretly on his mother, who regarded Ernie when he came to Rectory Walk to take his father out with eyes of increasing displeasure; for her eldest son was shabby and seedy almost now as in the days when he had been out of work after leaving the Hohenzollern. The word failure was stamped upon him in letters few could mis-read. And Anne Caspar had for all those who fail, with one exception, that profound sense of exasperation and disgust which finds its outlet in the contemptuous pity that is for modern man the camouflaged expression of the cruelty inherent in his animal nature. It seemed that all the love in her—and there was love in her as surely there is in us all—was exhausted on her own old man. For the rest her attitude towards the fallen in the arena was always Thumbs down—with perhaps an added zest of rancour and resentment because of the one she spared.

"She has brought you low," she commented one evening to Ernie in that pseudo-mystical voice, as of one talking in her sleep, from the covert of which some women hope to shoot their poisoned arrows with impunity. This time, however, she was not to escape just punishment.

Ernie flared.

"Who says she has then?"

Anne Caspar had struck a spark of reality out of the moss-covered flint; and now—as had happened at rare intervals throughout his life—Ernie made his mother suddenly afraid.

"Everyone," she said, lamely, trying vainly to cover her retreat.

"Ah," said Ernie, nodding. "I knaw who, and I\'ll let him knaw it too."

"Best be cautious," replied his mother with a smirk. "He\'s your landlord now. And you\'re behind."

Ernie rose.

"He may be my landlord," he cried. "But I\'m the daddy o he yet."

Sullenly he returned to the house that was now for him no home: for the woman who had made it home was punishing not without just cause the man who had betrayed it.


Ruth was standing now like a rock in the tide-way, the passions of men beating about her, her children clinging to her, the grey sky of circumstance enfolding her.

She had sought adventure and had found it. Battle now was hers; but it was battle stripped of all romance. Danger beset her; but it was wholly sordid. The battle was for bread—to feed her household; and soap—to keep her home and children clean. The danger was lest all the creeping diseases and hideous disabilities contingent upon penury, unknown even by name except in their grossest form to the millions whose lot it is to face and fight them day in, day out, should sap the powers of resistance of her and hers, and throw them on the scrap-heap at the mercy of Man, the merciless.

Tragic was her dilemma. To Ruth her home was everything because it meant the environment in which she must grow the souls and bodies of her children. And her home was threatened. That was the position, stark and terrible, which stared her in the eyes by day and night. The man provided her by the law had proved a No-man, as Joe called it. He was a danger to the home of which he should have been the support. And while her own man had failed her, another, a true man as she believed, was offering to take upon his strong and capable shoulders the burthen Ernie was letting fall.

Ruth agonised and well she might. For Joe was pressing in upon her, overpowering her, hammering at her gate with always fiercer insistence. Should she surrender?—should she op............