Mrs. Northover, however, saw nothing to praise, for Sabina’s speech had been broken a dozen times.

“If that’s what you call working kindly, I’d like to see the wretch in a nasty mood,” she said.  “I lay you want to slap it sometimes.”

Sabina was mending a drag that had burned off.  The drags were heavy weights hanging from strings that pressed upon the side of the bobbins and controlled their speed.  The friction often burned these cords through and the weights had to be lifted and retied again and again.

“We want a clever invention to put this right,” she said.  “A lot of good time’s wasted with the weights.  Nobody’s thought upon the right thing yet.”

“I’m properly dazed,” confessed Nelly Northover.  “You live and learn without a doubt—­nothing’s so true as that.”

Her niece had seen her and approached, as the machinery began to still for the dinner-hour.

“Morning, Sarah.  Can you do such wonders as Miss Dinnett?” she asked.

“No, Aunt Nelly.  I’m a spreader minder.  But I’ll be a spinner some day, if Mr. Roberts likes for me to stop, here after I’m married.”

“Sarah would soon learn to spin,” declared Sabina.

Then she turned to bid Raymond Ironsyde good morning.  His brother was away from Bridport on a tour with one of his travellers, that he might become acquainted with many of his more important customers.  Raymond, therefore, felt safe and was wasting a good deal of his time.  He had brought a basket of fruit from North Hill House—­a present from Estelle—­and he began to dispense plums and pears as the women streamed away to dinner.

They knew him very well now and treated him with varying degrees of familiarity.  Early doubts had vanished, and they took him as a good natured, rather ‘soft’ young man, who meant well and was friendly and harmless.  The ill-educated are always suspicious, and Levi Baggs declared from the first that Raymond was nothing better than his brother’s spy, placed here for a time to inquire into the ambitions and ideas of the workers and so help the firm to combat the lawful demands of those whom they employed; but this theory was long exploded save in the mind of Mr. Baggs himself.  The people of Bridetown Mill held Raymond on their side, and all were secretly interested to know what would spring of his frank friendship with Sabina.

In serious moments Raymond felt uneasy at the relations he had established with the workers, and Mr. Best did not hesitate to warn him again and again that discipline was ill served by such easy terms between employer and employed; but his moments of perspicuity were rare, for now his mind and soul were poured into one thought and one only.  He was riotously happy in his love affair and could not pretend to his fellow creatures anything he did not feel.  Always amiable and accessible, his romance made him still more so, and he was constitutionally unable at this moment to take a serious view of anything or anybody.