While she was thus happily occupied, her father was busily engaged with what looked like a toy engine. He was tinkering over one of those ideas of his, that Mr. Dering had spoken of. This particular idea was something connected with the speed of the locomotive and the economy of fuel at one and the same time. Two years before, certain improvements in this direction had been made, but they were not fully successful, because they did not combine harmoniously,—what was gained in one direction being partially lost in another. John Benham's idea was to invent something that should combine so harmoniously that a high rate of speed could be attainable with a minimum of fuel.
When he first started to work out this idea, he was quite confident that he could carry it through to success; but he had been at it now for months, and the harmonious combination still evaded him. What was it? What had he missed? Over and over again he would ask himself this question, and over and over again he would add here or take away there, and all without achieving the result he desired. So many failures had at length beaten down his courageous confidence not a little, and he had begun to think that he must be on the wrong track altogether, and might as well give up the whole thing.
He was thinking this very strongly that Monday night when he sat in his workshop,—a long, low room he had arranged for himself at the end of the house. The night was warm for the season, and through the open doorway he could hear the quavering, uncertain scraping of the little fiddle.
"Dear little soul!" he thought; "I hope this good time is paying her for that bad time of hers."
If he could only have known how thoroughly it was "paying her,"—that at that moment the bad time was pushed completely out of mind by the good time! He hoped that she was comforted; that was the most that he expected. For himself, nothing had put the story she had told him out of his mind; and while he sat there adjusting and readjusting the little model, it was half mechanically,—his thought being more occupied with his child's painful little experience, and all that it suggested to him. He was not a bitter or a violent man. He did not think that the poor were always in the right, and the rich always in the wrong in their relations with each other, as a good many working-people do. No; he was too intelligent for that. But what he did think, what he knew was, that the rich were not hampered and hindered by the daily struggle for existence, for the means to procure food and clothing and shelter from week to week. He knew that his own abilities were hindered and hampered by the necessity that compelled him to work almost incessantly for the necessaries of life. If he could have had only a little of the leisure of the rich, a little of their money, he could have had constantly at his hand, not merely the books that he needed, and the time to study them, but various other ways and opportunities would have been open to him to follow out his strong taste for mechanical construction. As it was, he had been obliged to grope along slowly, working at odd times after his labor of the day, and generally at some disadvantage, either in the lack of proper tools, or needed books of reference directly at his hand. All these thoughts bore down upon him that night with greater force than usual, because of Hope's story; for here it was again in another direction, that difference between the rich and the poor. And while he thought these thoughts, scrape, scrape, went Hope's bow across the strings.
"Do you hear that, John?" asked Mrs. Benham as she came into the workshop.
"Yes, I've been listening to it for some time." There was an absent expression in John Benham's eyes, as he glanced up. His wife noticed it.
"You look tired, John. I wouldn't bother over that"—with a nod at the engine model—"any more."
"No; I've about made up my mind to give it up. I don't seem to be on the right track with it, anyhow."
There was a depressed, discouraged note in the husband's voice that his wife at once detected. It was a new note for her to hear in that voice. She regarded him anxiously a moment, and then, smiling, but with a good deal of real earnestness, said,—