The end of twenty years found him a rich man, but still toiling pertinaciously day by day, as if he had his wage to earn.

In the great house which had been built to please, or rather placate, his wife, he kept to himself as much as possible.

The popular story of his smoking alone in the kitchen was more or less true; only Michael as a rule sat with him, too weak-lunged for tobacco himself, but reading stray scraps from the papers to the lonely old man, and talking with him about the works, the while Jeremiah meditatively sucked his clay pipe.

One or two evenings in the week the twain spent up in Celia's part of the house, listening with the awe of simple, honest mechanics to the music she played for them.
Celia was to them something indefinably less, indescribably more, than a daughter and sister.

They could not think there had ever been anything like her before in the world; the notion of criticising any deed or word of hers would have appeared to them monstrous and unnatural.
She seemed to have come up to this radiant and wise and marvellously talented womanhood of hers, to their minds, quite spontaneously.