"
She knew the place. A sad group of dilapidated little houses forming
three sides of a paved quadrangle, with a shattered fountain and withered
trees in the centre. Ever since she could remember, they had stood there
empty, ghostly, with creaking doors and broken windows, their gardens
overgrown with weeds.
"Are they yours?" she asked. She had never connected them with the
works, some half a mile away. Though had she been curious, she might
have learnt that they were known as "Allway's Folly."
"Your mother's," he answered. "I built them the year I came back from
America and gave them to her. I thought it would interest her. Perhaps
it would, if I had left her to her own ways."
"Why didn't they want them?" she asked.
"They did, at first," he answered. "The time-servers and the hypocrites
among them. I made it a condition that they should be teetotallers, and
chapel goers, and everything else that I thought good for them. I
thought that I could save their souls by bribing them with cheap rents
and share of profits. And then the Union came, and that of course
finished it.
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