The Veiled Man by Ambrose Pratt — Read

With whatever feelings Lord Cawthorne embarked upon his career as a student of the shipbuilding trade (and it was to be feared that they were embittered by coercion), it was not long before he became reconciled with his employment. To commence with, the work was interesting. Secondly it brought him into close and immediate contact with a class of earnest workers whom his own upbringing enabled him to understand and respect, and towards whom his sympathies flowed spontaneously. Finally it gave him a purpose in life as well as an occupation. The purpose, it is true, was not apparent all at once. In a measure it evolved itself, and Cawthorne had for some time been its servant before he realised that he should be its master if he did not wish its hobby horse to ride him. It began out of his good-nature and the sickness of an Irish engineer named Denis Flaherty.

Flaherty had grown up with the Shipping Company, and, although he possessed a wife and four grey-eyed daughters, he should not have needed help, since he had always earned good wages. Nevertheless, it only required one week of fever to exhaust his resources. Mr. Thorne, the reverend old rector of Stayton, assured the Earl a fortnight later that Flaherty's case deserved no sympathy, yet he was unable to deny that the family must have starved in the meanwhile save for his assistance. Mr. Thorne was always assisting some distressed person, always marvelling at the improvidence that produced such calls upon his purse. "In a town like Stayton," he was fond of saying, "with no surplus population, and with a constant call for labor at the shipping works, chiefly inhabited as it is by skilled mechanics, there should be no such thing as poverty. Yet what do we see----" At that juncture he would spread out his soft white palms, with an expression on his kind old face of amiable bewilderment, and add dejectedly, "I know of scarce a score of families with savings bank accounts."