had won, the power, the popularity, and of his boast that he had never been beaten, and she began to sob in the shadow of her corner.
"He's lost it all," she cried. "An' he won it with his own hands an' worked for it an' bore up agen a world! An' it's gone!"
It was when she came to this point that her terror seized on her as it had never done before. She got up, shaking in every limb.
"I'll go to him myself," she said. "Who should go to him but his mother? Who should find him an' be a help to him if I can't? Jem—Jem, my dear, it's me that's comin' to you—me!"
He had been sitting in a small back office in the Bank all through the day when they had been calling and searching for him. He had got in early and locked the door and waited, knowing well enough all that was to come. It was no feeling of fear that made him keep hidden; he had done with fear—if, indeed, he had ever felt it in his life. He knew what he was going to do and he laid his plans coolly. He was to stay here and do the work that lay before him and leave things as straight as he could, and then at night when all was quiet he would make his way out in the dark and go to the Works. It was only a fancy, this, of going to the Works, but he clung to it persistently.
He had never been clearer-headed in his life—only, sometimes as he was making a calculation or writing a letter he would dash down his work and fall to cursing.
"There's not another chap in England that had done it," he would say. "And it's gone!—it's gone!—it's gone!"
