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Matthew rose slowly to his feet.

"After supper to-night," he repeated. "Yes, perhaps that would be a good time. I was going down to the technical schools. There are some extra classes there, but I think I know as much as they can teach me. In half an hour we must start for home. I am going for a little walk first."

Rosina threw herself back once more upon the ground. Her hand went frankly out to Philip's, she held his fingers tightly in hers.

"Come back for us," she begged, "when you think we ought to start. Philip and I are going to build palaces."

Matthew stood looking down at them both for a moment, himself ignored. Without a shadow of sensitiveness in his nature, he was dimly aware of the spiritual barrier which separated him from these two, his companions in the great enterprise of life. He turned on his heel.

"Palaces in the air!" he muttered, a little scornfully. "You can build mine for me in Park Lane."

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There was no man in Norchester more respected or less liked than Benjamin Stone. He had built the first factory of its sort in the town, and become the pioneer of an industry which now provided employment for the greater number of its two hundred thousand inhabitants. He had been mayor three times and would have accepted that office again but for the possibility of a royal visit. Benjamin Stone did not believe in royalty. He was a devout Nonconformist, and an occasional preacher in the chapel which he had built and endowed. He was charitable so far as regarded gifts to institutions, an abstainer from principle, a widower sixty years of age, whose private life was almost absurdly beyond reproach, and his existence would have been even more solitary than it was but for the singular accident of having had the charge of three young people thrust upon him at different times.