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"If I were in your shoes," said Hesketh, thoughtfully, "I can't say I would." On grounds of sentiment, Octavius assured him, they were absolutely at one, but in practical matters a man had to proceed on business principles. He went about at this time expressing great esteem for Hesketh's capacity to assimilate facts.
One woman deceived all the medical people, clergyman, jailer, and turnkeys, was removed to Bedlam as incurably mad, and from Bedlam made her escape. I saw a girl of about eighteen, who had been educated at Miss Hesketh's school, and had been put to service in a friend's family.
He held back from that and leaned against the door frame, crossing his arms and looking over into the market-place for subjects to postpone Hesketh's departure. They talked of various matters in sight, Hesketh showing the zest of his newly determined citizenship in every observation the extension of the electric tramway, the pulling down of the old Fire Hall.
I? Oh it doesn't attract us over there. We're getting away from it leaving it to the newcomers from this side. Curious circle, that: I wonder when our place gets overcrowded, where we shall go to plough?" Hesketh's situation occupied them a good deal; but their great topic had a wider drift, embracing nothing less than the Empire, pausing nowhere short of the flag.
He faced danger with reckless unconcern every day of his life. He was employed as a "vessel-man" at the Leeds Steel Works, working on a twelve-hours' shift, and his duty was to attend to the huge "vessels" or crucibles in which the molten pig-iron is converted by the Bessemer process into steel. The operation is one of enthralling interest and beauty, and Job Hesketh's soul was in his work.
He offers me plenty of work, and I am thinking seriously of closing with him." "Go over to the United States? You can't mean that!" "Oh yes it's the next best thing!" Hesketh's face assumed a gravity, a look of feeling and of remonstrance. He came a step nearer and put a hand on his companion's arm. "Come now, Murchison," he said, "I ask you is this a time to be thinking of chucking the Empire?"
For accepting the strokes of fate we have curiously trivial demonstrations. Lorne met Hesketh's eye with the steadiness of a lion's in his own; the unusual thing he did was to take his hands out of his pockets and let his arms hang loosely by his side. It was as tragic a gesture of helplessness as if he had flung them above his head. "Dora is going to marry you?"
He went on ahead with his impetuous step; he did not perceive the instant's paralysis that seemed to overtake Hesketh's, whose foot dragged, however, no longer than that. It was an initiation; he had been told he might expect some. He checked his impulse to be amused, and guarded his look round, not to show unseemly curiosity.
Far out in the Northwest, where the emigrant trains had been unloading all the summer, Hesketh's would have been a voice from home; but here, in long-settled Ontario, men had forgotten the sound of it, with many other things. They listened in silence, weighing with folded arms, appraising with chin in hand; they were slow, equitable men.
I think it was a real aesthetic satisfaction; I know they would talk of it afterward for hours, with sighing comparisons of the "form" of the young men of Elgin, which they called beside Hesketh's quite outre. It was a favourite word with Mrs Milburn outre. She used it like a lorgnette, and felt her familiarity with it a differentiating mark.
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