Beyond this it was not so easy.

Arkwright wondered, indeed, sometimes, if he were making any progress at all.

But still he persevered.
He walked with Bertram, he talked with Bertram, unobtrusively he contrived to be near Bertram almost always, when they were together with "the boys." Gradually he won from him the story of what the surgeon had said to him, and of how black the future looked in consequence.

This established a new bond between them, so potent that Arkwright ventured to test it one day by telling Bertram the story of the tiger skin--the first tiger skin in his uncle's library years ago, and of how, since then, any difficulty he had encountered he had tried to treat as a tiger skin.

In telling the story he was careful to draw no moral for his listener, and to preach no sermon.