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22 meal 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 un he is."

"What's that he's reading?"

"Summat 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 him. He turned away with a shrug of his burly shoulders.

"He doesn't look like an Englishman," he said. "He hasn't got backbone enough."

Afterward when the two accidentally came in contact, Haworth wasted few civil words. At times his domineering brusqueness excited Murdoch to wonder.

"He's a queer fellow, that Haworth," he said reflectingly to Floxham. "Sometimes I think he's out of humor with me."

With the twelve-year-old daughter of one of the workmen, who used to bring her father's dinner, the young fellow had struck up something of a friendship. She was the eldest of twelve, a mature young person, whose business-like air had attracted him.

She had assisted her mother in the rearing of her family from her third year, and had apparently done with the