was no worse than they are. And I will be. I won't put up with it. If some people have to be treated like dirt, I'm going to help do the treating."

"That's no right way of thinking," she warned. "It's money makes the mare go."

But in Sylvia's case, George admitted, there was other propulsion than that; something more fragile, and harder to understand or capture for one's self.

"Don't you worry, I'll make money," he said.

She glanced up quickly.

"Who's that?"

A brisk masculine voice volleyed through the shrubbery:

"Young Morton! I say, young Morton!"

"It's Mr. Lambert," she breathed. "Go quick."

George remembered what Sylvia had said about someone else having the strength.

"Can't you guess, Ma, what the young lady's brother wants of me?"

The bitterness left his face. His smile was engaging.

"To give me the devil."

"Young Morton! Young Morton!"

"Coming!" he called.

"George," she begged, "don't have any trouble with Mr. Lambert."

III

She watched him with anxious eyes, failing to observe, because she was his mother, details that informed his boasts with power. His ancestry of labour had given him, at least, his straight, slender, and unusually muscular body, and from somewhere had crept in the pride, just now stimulated, with which he carried it. His wilful, regular features, moreover, guarded by youth, were still uncoarsened.

He found Lambert Planter waiting beyond the old boundary behind a screen of bushes, his 

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