"Oh! he's like that, always has been," Hubert replied, ignoring the uncomplimentary parallel. "And he gets worse. He's been frightfully difficult lately." He paused and warming to a closer confidence, went on, "The devil of it is that you never know what he's really after. If he got into a fearful pad, you'd know where you were, more or less. But he's always as cool as a cucumber. Makes you feel such an infernal ass."
"But suppose," Arthur suggested, "that you simply didn't do what he wanted you to? Suppose, for instance, that you stuck it out you were going to marry Miss Martin and be damned to him. What could he do?"
The mere suggestion seemed to make Hubert uneasy. "Couldn't do anything in a way," he grumbled. "But—well—no more could I. Her people aren't well off and I simply haven't got a bean of my own."
"You might get a job somewhere else as an estate agent?" Arthur put in.
Hubert shook his head. "Those jobs are jolly hard to get," he said. "I have thought about it. But I've had no experience really, not to count. And naturally I shouldn't get any testimonial from the old man, if I chucked this. Rankin would have ten times the chance I've got of a job like that, and you should hear him let himself go when he gets cold feet about anything. He's got five kids, you know, and he'd do any mortal thing not to offend the old man. And then, of course, he guesses that he's down for a bit in the will. They all do—all the servants, I mean. They're all hanging on on low wages." He gave a little bark of laughter as he concluded: "Like the rest of us."
"Rotten," Arthur agreed sympathetically. He had begun to like Hubert. It was not his fault that he had no backbone. He had never had a chance to develop one. And this affair with the jolly Miss Martin was quite the worst kind of luck.
They were still standing in the spinney wrapped about by the peace of the Sunday afternoon. It was a dull, windless day, threatening rain; and the very sounds of the wood served to emphasise the repose of humanity. The wheel at the generating station was not working, and except for the distant splash of the overfall and the faint humming of undistinguishable insects, the whole of Hartling seemed to be plunged in sleep.
Hubert took his cousin's arm and they walked on slowly toward the power-house.
"I expect you'll think it perfectly rotten of me to ask," he said in a low confidential voice; "but—you don't think there is any chance of his breaking up, do you?"
Arthur sincerely wished at the moment that he could give an encouraging reply, but he could find none.