decent clothes, and I'll see that Sam shan't fall behind them."

Tom took a holiday at home, varied with trips on the foot-plates of friendly engine-drivers, and fortified his soul with the consolations of tobacco. They were consolations which were not to be vouchsafed to him much longer. Tobacco cost money, and Anne had need of it.

In spite of Travers' generosity—or of as much of it as she could bring herself to accept—it was not an easy thing for Anne to keep her son at the Grammar School. It was desperately difficult, but Anne was Anne. The boy had his foot on the educational ladder, and she meant him to go to the top, rung by rung and scholarship by scholarship. When Sam took his honours degree at Oxford, Anne would relax; till then, she was a crusader. She sacrificed all to that ambition. Sam should have his chance, at no matter what cost to her, to Tom and to Madge. The boy must be as well dressed as his fellows, and he must play their games. Games are an essential part of English education, and Anne, with her constant eye to the main chance, recognized the importance of the playing-fields in cementing friendships with boys who might be useful to Sam in after life. But games are expensive, and Tom gave, up smoking when Sam was put into his class eleven. Anne gave up nothing. She had nothing more to give.

Honestly, Sam was grateful. Anne did not boast to him of the sacrifices which they all made, but with the candour which distinguishes working-class homes where anything but bare necessity is exceptional, he was aware of every move, of all their deprivation, and did his best to square accounts. But it was not a brilliant best, and after that first term, Anne never repeated the satisfaction of seeing her son carry away a form prize on Speech Day at the Free Trade Hall. He was a worker, a safe plodding "swot," taking by sheer application a respectable place in the lists, but never heading them again, and especially he was weak at mathematics.

That troubled Anne distressingly. Mathematics appeared to her the corner-stone of education, though in truth they mattered little to Sam, who had followed Lance to the Classical side of the school, where mathematics were an unconsidered trifle. But Anne recked nothing of that. She had found the heel of her Achilles, and set herself to make that vulnerable place secure. You are to picture Anne, with her forty years of a working woman's life behind her, wrestling with algebra and trigonometry, blazing a trail for Sam to follow. It was heroic and, by some mental freak, successful. She taught herself, then tutored him, and it was not Sam who scraped through to an average place in the mathematics examinations, but Anne in Sam. Day after day, in the intervals of cook ing, cleaning, washing, she studied the text-books which so puzzled him, and at night explained their knotty points to him with a wonderful clarity. She had no education in particular, nothing but a general capacity and a monstrous will—a will that surmounted the obstacle of acquiring knowledge at an age when few can learn, and the greater obstacle of patient teaching to a boy who had a blind spot for mathematics. She illumined his darkness, but perhaps she hampered his classics and made her hopes of Oxford visionary.

Slowly and painfully, as the terms went by, with Branstone, S. rising steadily in the school, but keeping regularly to his mediocre place in class, Anne acknowledged to herself that her goose was not a swan. It made her the more eager to cultivate what she called the social side; and through that she met with a defeat.

From the beginning, Sam's rise in the world had borne heavily on Madge, his sister, who was of an age for gaiety and of a mind untouched by ambition, personal or vicarious. When Sam went to the Grammar School, Madge was in service and very content. Anne had her out of that at once; she wasn't going to run the risk of Madge being the servant in the house of one of Sands school companions. It was unusual, but Madge preferred service, where she was lucky in her employers, to the weaving-shed, where she had free evenings, but strenuous days with no gossiping callers at the back door to break their monotony. And it became a considerable question in Madge's mind whether she would now be able to outface Anne in the matter of George Chappie. Anne required a presentable brother-in-law for Sam.

Like Madge, George was unambitious, except that he wanted her, which was ambition of a kind. Madge was small, like her mother, but derived in most else from her father. She had freckles and carroty hair, and the makings of a querulous shrew, but George saw otherwise, and desired Madge to have and to hold, for better for worse, and didn't perceive that the odds were heavily against its being better. He was a wisp of a man himself, and thought he was enterprising because he was a window-cleaner; window-cleaning was a new trade then. But Anne did not concur with that opinion, and Madge was in no very sanguine frame of mind when George came in one night with an "It's now or never" look unmistakably in his eye. The trouble was that Anne was not the sort of mother one defied with impunity.

He came in shyly enough—a determined George was a contradiction in terms—but plucked up courage at once when he found that she was alone but for Sam. Sam's presence was inevitable, but need not be acknowledged. In a house, not, indeed, of one room, but of one fire and one gas-jet, Sam had grown apt at insulating himself when he sat with his books at the table. The business of the house went on, so did Sam's studies, and neither interfered with the other. Sam, absorbed in his construe of Cicero's De Senectute for the morrow, was absolutely unconscious of Madge and George.

It was not Sam who troubled George, but Madge had truth with her when she told her suitor that he looked worried. George jerked his thumb vaguely streetwards. "It's her again," he explained. "I can't think why God made landladies. I ask you, Madge, is another blanket in this weather a thing to fly into a temper about?"

"It's cold," said Madge. "Won't she give you another?"

"I don't know yet whether she'll give me one or not. But she's had my last word. Another blanket or I'll flit."

"You've threatened that so often."

He admitted it. "I know. It takes an earthquake to shift some folks, and I reckon I'm one of them. I stay where I'm set." And his tone implied that conservatism was an admirable virtue.

Madge did not think so. "That's what my mother says of you," she observed, a trifle tartly.

"It's no lie, either," he placidly agreed. "Seems to me," he went on, with a look, ardent but appealing, at Madge, "that there's only one thing will flit me from Mrs. Whitehead's. You couldn't give a guess at it, could you?"

"Yes, I could," said Madge brazenly. After all, she was Anne's daughter, and direct. Then, despite herself, she fenced coyly: "You're leaving the town, I reckon, Mr. Chappie."

He stood aghast at the revolutionary thought. "Nay," he said earnestly. "I'm set here and I'll not leave willing. There's something to keep me where I am."

"Your job's not worth so much," she said, misunderstanding wilfully.

"It's steady, though," he defended it, "and a growing trade. My master's getting a lot of window-cleaning contracts all over the town. But it's not my job that keeps me here. It's———" He dropped his cap and fumbled for it nervously, somehow finding a sort of courage in the act, so that when he rose he faced her with a spirit which was, for him, quite debonair. "Now, you'll not stop me, will you? I've come on purpose to get this off my chest and I've worked myself up to a point. I'm a bit slow at most things and I'm easily put off, so I'll ask you to give my humble request a patient hearing."

Madge looked at him acutely, and decided that his resolution was strong enough to survive something that she very much wanted to say. "I'd rather this didn't come straight on top of a row with your landlady," she said.

"Aye," he