After a minute or two he said, “What’s your trade?”

Trenholme, sitting there in the clear light, would have blushed as he answered had his face not been too much weathered to admit of change of colour.  He went through that momentary change of feeling that we connect with blushes.  He had been perfectly conscious that this question was coming, and perfectly conscious, too, that when he answered it he would fall in Bates’s estimation, that his prestige would be gone.  He thought he did not mind it, but he did.

“Butcher,” he said.

“Ye’re not in earnest?” said Bates, with animosity.

“Upon my word.”

“Ye don’t look like that”—­with disappointment.

“Look like what?”—­fiercely—­“What would you have me look like?  My father was as good-looking a man as you’d see in the three kingdoms, and as good a butcher, too.  He got rich, had three shops, and he sent us boys to the best school he could find.  He’d have set me up in any business I liked; if I chose his it was because—­I did choose it.”

He was annoyed at Bates’s open regret, just as we are constantly more annoyed at fresh evidence of a spirit we know to be in a man than with the demonstration of some unexpected fault, because we realise the trait we have fathomed and see how poor it is.

“How did your brother come to be a minister?”

“He’s a clergyman of the Church of England”—­with loftiness.

“Well, that’s more of a thing than a minister; how did he come by it?”

“He was clever, and father was able to send him to Oxford.  He was a good deal older than I was.  I suppose he took to the Church because he thought it his duty.”

“And now that he’s out here he wants to sink the shop?”

“Oh, as to that”—­coldly—­“when he was quite young, in England, he got in with swells.  He’s tremendously clever.  There were men in England that thought no end of him.”

“Did he lie low about the shop there?”

“I don’t know”—­shortly—­“I was at school then.”

Bates, perceiving that his questions were considered vastly offensive, desisted, but not with that respectfulness of mind that he would have had had Alec’s father been a clergyman as well as his brother.  Bates’s feeling in this matter was what it was by inheritance, exactly as was the shape of his nose or the length of his limbs; it required no exercise of thought on his part to relegate Alec Trenholme to a place of less consequence.

Trenholme assuaged his own ill-temper by going to take out his pink and grey grosbeaks and give them exercise.  He was debating in his mind whether they were suffering from confinement or not—­a question which the deportment of the birds never enabled him to solve completely—­when Bates wandered round beside him again, and betrayed that his mind was still upon the subject of their conversation.

“Ye know,” he began, with the deliberate interest of a Scotchman in an argument, “I’ve been thinking on it, and I’m thinking your brother’s in the right of it.”