Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV. JANEY BRIARLEY. A Week later Hilary Murdoch returned from the Brox- ton grave-yard in a drizzling rain, and made his way to the bare, cleanly swept chamber upstairs. Since the night on which he had cried out to his mother that she must not enter, the table at which the dead man had been wont to sit at work had been pushed aside. Some one had thrown a white cloth over it. Murdoch went to it and drew this cloth away. He stood and looked down at the little skeleton of wood and steel. It had been nothing but a curse from first to last, and yet it fascinated him. He found it hard to do the thing he had come to do. " It is not finished," he said to the echoes of the empty room. " It—never will be." He slowly replaced it in its case, and buried it out of sight at the bottom of the trunk which, from that day forward, would stand unused and locked. When he arose, after doing this, he unconsciously struck his hands together as he had seen grave-diggers do when they brushed the damp soil away. The first time Haworth saw his new hand he regarded him with small favor. In crossing the yard one day at noon, he came upon him disposing of his middaymeal and reading at the same time. He stopped to look at him. " Who's that ? " he asked one of the men. The fellow grinned in amiable appreciation of the rough tone of the query. " That's th' 'Merican," he answered. " An' a soft nn he is." " What's that he's reading ? " " Sunimat about engineering loike as not. That's his crank." In the rush of his new plans and the hurry of the last few months, Haworth had had time to forget the man who had wished him " good luck," and whose pathetic figure had been a shadow upon the first glow of his triumph. He did not connect him at all with the young fellow before ...