And he turned at once to another subject.





CHAPTER 3




The year was 1886.

When at business, Warburton sat in a high, bare room, which looked
upon little Ailie Street, in Whitechapel; the air he breathed had a
taste and odour strongly saccharine. If his eye strayed to one of
the walls, he saw a map of the West Indies; if to another, it fell
upon a map of St. Kitts; if to the third, there was before him a
plan of a sugar estate on that little island. Here he sat for
certain hours of the solid day, issuing orders to clerks, receiving
commercial callers, studying trade journals in sundry languages--
often reading some book which had no obvious reference to the
sugar-refining industry. It was not Will's ideal of life, but hither
he had suffered himself to be led by circumstance, and his musings
suggested no practicable issue into a more congenial world.

The death of his father when he was sixteen had left him with a
certain liberty for shaping a career. What he saw definitely before
him was a small share in the St. Kitts property of Messrs. Sherwood
Brothers, a small share in the London business of the same firm, and