"We must not let him think that we talk of him," Christian said.
She showed a wonderful gentleness and tact. Until long afterward, Mrs. Murdoch scarcely knew what support and comfort she had in her. Her past life had planted in her a readiness to despair.
"He is like his father," she said once. "He was like him as a child. He is very trusting and faithful, but when his belief is gone it is all over. He has given up as his father did before he died. He will not try to live."
He did not try to live, but he did not think of death. He was too full of other morbid thoughts. He could not follow any idea far. A thousand of them came and went, and in the end were as nothing.
"Why," he kept saying to himself weakly and wearily,—"why was it? What had I done? It was a strange thing to choose me out of so many. I was hardly worth it. To have chosen another man would have served her better."
He did not know how the days passed at the Works. The men began to gaze at him askance and mutter when he went by.
"Th' feyther went daft," they said. "Is this chap goin' th' same way?"
It was only the look of his face which made them say so. He got through his work one way or another. But the days were his dread. The nights, strange and dreadful enough, were better than the broad daylight, with the scores of hands about him and the clangor of hammers and whir of machinery. He fell into the habit of going to the engine-room and standing staring at the engine, fascinated by it. Once he drew nearer and nearer with such a look in his eye that Floxham began to regard him stealthily. He went closer, pace by pace, and at last made a step which brought a shout from Floxham, who sprang upon him and tore him away.
"What art at, tha foo'?" he yelled. "Does tha want to go whoam on a shutter?"
Wakening, with a long breath, he said: