If Winter Comes

by A. S. M. Hutchinson

Young Perch grasped his hand in delighted relief. "Oh, Sabre, if you do! I felt you would help. You've always been a chap to turn to!"

"I've turned to you, Perch, you and your mother, a good deal more than you might imagine. I'm glad to help if I can. The chance I'm thinking about I was hearing of only a few days ago. The works' foreman in my office, an old chap called Bright. He's got a daughter about eighteen or thereabouts, and I was hearing he wanted to get her into some kind of post like yours. I've spoken to her once or twice when she's been about the place for her father and I took a tremendous fancy to her. She's as pretty as a picture. Effie, she's called. I believe your mother would take to her no end. And she'd just love your mother."

Young Perch said rather thickly, "Any one would who takes her the right way."

Sabre touched him encouragingly on the shoulder. "This girl Effie will if only we can get her. She's that sort, I know. I'll see about it at once. Buck up, old man."

"Thanks most frightfully, Sabre. Thanks most awfully."

IX

It was from Twyning that Sabre had heard that a post of some sort was being considered for Effie Bright. Her father, as he had told young Perch, was works' foreman at Fortune, East and Sabre's. "Mr. Bright." A massive old man with a massive, rather striking face hewn beneath a bald dome and thickly grown all about and down the throat with stiff white hair. He had been in the firm as long as Mr. Fortune himself and appeared to Sabre, who had little to do with him, to take orders from nobody. He was intensely religious and he had the deep-set and extraordinarily penetrating eyes that frequently denote the religious zealot. He was not liked by the hands. They called him Moses, disliked his intense religiosity and feared the cold and heavy manner that he had. He trod heavily about the workshops, looking into the eyes of the young men as if far more concerned to search their souls than their benches; and Sabre, when speaking to him, always had the feeling that Mr. Bright was penetrating him with the same intention.

Extraordinary that such a stern and hard old man should have for daughter such a fresh and lovable slip of a young thing as his Effie! Bright Effie, Sabre always called her, inverting her names. Mr. Bright had a little cupboard called his office at the foot of the main stairway and Bright Effie came often to see her father there. Sabre had spoken to her in the little cupboard or just outside it. He had delight in watching the most extraordinary shining that she had in her eyes. It was like reading an entertaining book, he used to think, and he had the idea that humor of that rarest kind which is unbounded love mingled with unbounded sense of the oddities of life was packed to bursting within her. All that she saw or heard seemed to be taken into that exhaustless fount, metamorphosed into the most delicious sensations, and shone forth in extraordinarily humorous delight through her eyes. Somewhere in the dullest day light is found and thrown back by a bright surface. It was just so, Sabre used to think, with Effie. All things were fresh to her and she found freshness in all things.

Some such apprehension of her Sabre had expressed to Twyning on the occasion that came to his mind during young Perch's entreaty for some one to live with his mother. Sabre had been standing with Twyning at Mr. Fortune's window, Mr. Bright and Effie leaving the office and crossing the street together beneath them. Twyning, who was on intimate terms with Mr. Bright, had given a short laugh and said, "Hullo, you seem to have been thinking a lot about the fair Effie!"

The kind of laugh and the kind of remark that Sabre hated and he gave a slight gesture which Twyning well knew meant that he hated it. This was what Twyning called "stuck-uppishness" and equally hated, and he chose words expressive of his resentment,—the class insistence.