dear boy, though you always so kindly try to make me feel as if we were
contemporaries--I am getting to be an old man, and a great many people have
been good enough to confide their matrimonial troubles to me; but I never knew
another case like my niece's and her husband's. I have known her since she was
a baby, Trent, and I know--you understand, I think, that I do not employ that
word lightly--I know that she is as amiable and honourable a woman, to say
nothing of her other good gifts, as any man could wish. But Manderson, for
some time past, had made her miserable.'

'What did he do?' asked Trent, as Mr. Cupples paused.

'When I put that question to Mabel, her words were that he seemed to nurse a
perpetual grievance. He maintained a distance between them, and he would say
nothing. I don't know how it began or what was behind it; and all she would
tell me on that point was that he had no cause in the world for his attitude.
I think she knew what was in his mind, whatever it was; but she is full of
pride. This seems to have gone on for months. At last, a week ago, she wrote
to me. I am the only near relative she has. Her mother died when she was a
child; and after John Peter died I was something like a father to her until
she married--that was five years ago. She asked me to come and help her, and I
came at once. That is why I am here now.'

Mr. Cupples paused and drank some tea. Trent smoked and stared out at the hot
June landscape.

'I would not go to White Gables,' Mr. Cupples resumed. 'You know my views, I
think, upon the economic constitution of society, and the proper relationship
of the capitalist to the employee, and you know, no doubt, what use that
person made of his vast industrial power upon several very notorious
occasions. I refer especially to the trouble in the Pennsylvania coal-fields,