She began to fidget and to fret.
It was monstrous, so she declared, that her son should be working in a factory. Such a circumstance stung her pride.
Rupert must go to a tutor's. She knew that John Haverford had left a small sum of money, and she declared that this money should be used for Rupert's education.
Matthew Woolgar took absolutely no notice of her wishes, and after a time she grew tired, and left Rupert to his fate.
The care, the anxious, engrossing care that her second boy demanded of her filled her every thought.
And so a few years rolled on, marked only for Rupert by the knowledge that he was slowly but surely moving upwards, and sweetened by the fact that he was following those lines which his father had laid down for him as far as he could.
Half his wages went in books and to pay for tuition. He had put himself into the hands of one of the masters of a school situated just outside the town, and with this man he had worked in every spare hour he had.
His craving for knowledge amounted to greediness.
Perhaps once in a while he met Woolgar, who had grown into a surly and suffering man; there was nothing, however, in this old man's treatment of him to indicate even in the faintest degree the wonderful future which awaited him.
When he was twenty-six Rupert was in a post of authority at the factory; when he was thirty he was master of all that Matthew Woolgar possessed—a fortune so large that no one quite knew its limits; a young man with the world before him, and a certain section of the world at his feet.