The Fruit of the Tree

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Fruit of the Tree, by Edith Wharton

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

Title: The Fruit of the Tree

Author: Edith Wharton

Illustrator: Alonzo Kimball

Release Date: September 6, 2006 [EBook #19191]

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FRUIT OF THE TREE ***

Produced by Barbara Tozier, Bill Tozier, Melissa Er-Raqabi and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

THE FRUIT OF THE TREE

[Illustration: He stood by her in silence, his eyes on the injured man.]

THE FRUIT OF THE TREE BY EDITH WHARTON

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY ALONZO KIMBALL

NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS MDCCCCVII

COPYRIGHT, 1907, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

[Illustration: mark]

ILLUSTRATIONS

He stood by her in silence, his eyes on the injured man Frontispiece “No—I shall have to ask you to take my word for it” Facing p. 82 Half-way up the slope they met 130

BOOK I

THE FRUIT OF THE TREE

I

IN the surgical ward of the Hope Hospital at Hanaford, a nurse was bending over a young man whose bandaged right hand and arm lay stretched along the bed.

His head stirred uneasily, and slipping her arm behind him she effected a professional readjustment of the pillows. “Is that better?”

As she leaned over, he lifted his anxious bewildered eyes, deep-sunk under ridges of suffering. “I don’t s’pose there’s any kind of a show for me, is there?” he asked, pointing with his free hand—the stained seamed hand of the mechanic—to the inert bundle on the quilt.

Her only immediate answer was to wipe the dampness from his forehead; then she said: “We’ll talk about that tomorrow.”

“Why not now?”

“Because Dr. Disbrow can’t tell till the inflammation goes down.”

“Will it go down by tomorrow?”

“It will begin to, if you don’t excite yourself and keep up the fever.”

“Excite myself? I—there’s four of ‘em at home–-“

“Well, then there are four reasons for keeping quiet,” she rejoined.

She did not use, in speaking, the soothing inflection of her trade: she seemed to disdain to cajole or trick the sufferer. Her full young voice kept its cool note of authority, her sympathy revealing itself only in the expert touch of her hands and the constant vigilance of her dark steady eyes. This vigilance softened to pity as the patient turned his head away with a groan. His free left hand continued to travel the sheet, clasping and unclasping itself in contortions of feverish unrest. It was as though all the anguish of his mutilation found expression in that lonely hand, left without work in the world now that its mate was useless.

The nurse felt a touch on her shoulder, and rose to face the matron, a sharp-featured woman with a soft intonation.

“This is Mr. Amherst, Miss Brent. The assistant manager from the mills. He wishes to see Dillon.”

John Amherst’s step was singularly noiseless. The nurse, sensitive by nature and training to all physical characteristics, was struck at once by the contrast between his alert face and figure and the silent way in which he moved. She noticed, too, that the same contrast was repeated in the face itself, its spare energetic outline, with the high nose and compressed lips of the mover of men, being curiously modified by the veiled inward gaze of the grey eyes he turned on her. It was one of the interests of Justine Brent’s crowded yet lonely life to attempt a rapid mental classification of the persons she met; but the contradictions in Amherst’s face baffled her, and she murmured inwardly “I don’t know” as she drew aside to let him approach the bed. He stood by her in silence, his hands clasped behind him, his eyes on the injured man, who lay motionless, as if sunk in a lethargy. The matron, at the call of another nurse, had minced away down the ward, committing Amherst with a glance to Miss Brent; and the two remained alone by the bed.

After a pause, Amherst moved toward the window beyond the empty cot adjoining Dillon’s. One of the white screens used to isolate dying patients had been placed against this cot, which was the last at that end of the ward, and the space beyond formed a secluded corner, where a few words could be exchanged out of reach of the eyes in the other beds.

“Is he asleep?” Amherst asked, as Miss Brent joined him.

Miss Brent glanced at him again. His voice betokened not merely education, but something different and deeper—the familiar habit of gentle speech; and his shabby clothes—carefully brushed, but ill-cut and worn along the seams—sat on him easily, and with the same difference.

“The morphine has made him drowsy,” she answered. “The wounds were dressed about an hour ago, and the doctor gave him a hypodermic.”

“The wounds—how many are there?”

“Besides the hand, his arm is badly torn up to the elbow.”

Amherst listened with bent head and frowning brow.

“What do you think of the case?”

She hesitated. “Dr. Disbrow hasn’t said–-“

“And it’s not your business to?” He smiled slightly. “I know hospital etiquette. But I have a particular reason for asking.” He broke off and looked at her again, his veiled gaze sharpening to a glance of concentrated attention. “You’re not one of the regular nurses, are you? Your dress seems to be of a different colour.”

She smiled at the “seems to be,” which denoted a tardy and imperfect apprehension of the difference between dark-blue linen and white.

“No: I happened to be staying at Hanaford, and hearing that they were in want of a surgical nurse, I offered my help.”

Amherst nodded. “So much the better. Is there any place where I can say two words to you?”

“I could hardly leave the ward now, unless Mrs. Ogan comes back.”

“I don’t care to have you call Mrs. Ogan,” he interposed quickly. “When do you go off duty?”

She looked at him in surprise. “If what you want to ask about is—anything connected with the management of things here—you know we’re not supposed to talk of our patients outside of the hospital.”

“I know. But I am going to ask you to break through the rule—in that poor fellow’s behalf.”

A protest wavered on her lip, but he held her eyes steadily, with a glint of good-humour behind his determination. “When do you go off duty?”

“At six.”

“I’ll wait at the corner of South Street and walk a little way with you. Let me put my case, and if you’re not convinced you can refuse to answer.”

“Very well,” she said, without farther hesitation; and Amherst, with a slight nod of farewell, passed through the door near which they had been standing.

II

WHEN Justine Brent emerged from the Hope Hospital the October dusk had fallen and the wide suburban street was almost dark, except when the illuminated bulk of an electric car flashed by under the maples.

She crossed the tracks and approached the narrower thoroughfare where Amherst awaited her. He hung back a moment, and she was amused to see that he failed to identify the uniformed nurse with the girl in her trim dark dress, soberly complete in all its accessories, who advanced to him, smiling under her little veil.

“Thank you,” he said as he turned and walked beside her. “Is this your way?”

“I am staying in Oak Street. But it’s just as short to go by Maplewood Avenue.”

“Yes; and quieter.”

For a few yards they walked on in silence, their long steps falling naturally into time, though Amherst was somewhat taller than his companion.

At length he said: “I suppose you know nothing about the relation between Hope Hospital and the Westmore Mills.”

“Only that the hospital was endowed by one of the Westmore family.”

“Yes; an old Miss Hope, a great-aunt of Westmore’s. But there is more than that between them—all kinds of subterranean passages.” He paused, and began again: “For instance, Dr. Disbrow married the sister of our manager’s wife.”

“Your chief at the mills?”

“Yes,” he said with a slight grimace. “So you see, if Truscomb—the manager—thinks one of the mill-hands is only slightly injured, it’s natural that his brother-in-law, Dr. Disbrow, should take an optimistic view of the case.”

“Natural? I don’t know–-“

“Don’t you think it’s natural that a man should be influenced by his wife?”

“Not where his professional honour is concerned.”

Amherst smiled. “That sounds very young—if you’ll excuse my saying so. Well, I won’t go on to insinuate that, Truscomb being high in favour with the Westmores, and the Westmores having a lien on the hospital, Disbrow’s position there is also bound up with his taking—more or less—the same view as Truscomb’s.”

Miss Brent had paused abruptly on the deserted pavement.

“No, don’t go on—if you want me to think well of you,” she flashed out.

Amherst met the thrust composedly, perceiving, as she turned to face him, that what she resented was not so much his insinuation against his superiors as his allusion to the youthfulness of her sentiments. She was, in fact, as he now noticed, still young enough to dislike being excused for her youth. In her severe uniform of blue linen, her dusky skin darkened by the nurse’s cap, and by the pale background of the hospital walls, she had seemed older, more competent and experienced; but he now saw how fresh was the pale curve of her cheek, and how smooth the brow clasped in close waves of hair.

“I began at the wrong end,” he acknowledged. “But let me put Dillon’s case before you dismiss me.”

She softened. “It is only because of my interest in that poor fellow that I am here–-“

“Because you think he needs help—and that you can help him?”

But she held back once more. “Please tell me about him first,” she said, walking on.

Amherst met the request with another question. “I wonder how much you know about factory life?”

“Oh, next to nothing. Just what I’ve managed to pick up in these two days at the hospital.”

He glanced at her small determined profile under its dark roll of hair, and said, half to himself: “That might be a good deal.”

She took no notice of this, and he went on: “Well, I won’t try to put the general situation before you, though Dillon’s accident is really the result of it. He works in the carding room, and on the day of the accident his ‘card’ stopped suddenly, and he put his hand behind him to get a tool he needed out of his trouser-pocket. He reached back a little too far, and the card behind him caught his hand in its million of diamond-pointed wires. Truscomb and the overseer of the room maintain that the accident was due to his own carelessness; but the hands say that it was caused by the fact of the cards being too near together, and that just such an accident was bound to happen sooner or later.”

Miss Brent drew an eager breath. “And what do you say?”

“That they’re right: the carding-room is shamefully overcrowded. Dillon hasn’t been in it long—he worked his way up at the mills from being a bobbin-boy—and he hadn’t yet learned how cautious a man must be in there. The cards are so close to each other that even the old hands run narrow risks, and it takes the cleverest operative some time to learn that he must calculate every movement to a fraction of an inch.”

“But why do they crowd the rooms in that way?”

“To get the maximum of profit out of the minimum of floor-space. It costs more to increase the floor-space than to maim an operative now and then.”

“I see. Go on,” she murmured.

“That’s the first point; here is the second. Dr. Disbrow told Truscomb this morning that Dillon’s hand would certainly be saved, and that he might get back to work in a couple of months if the company would present him with an artificial finger or two.”

Miss Brent faced him with a flush of indignation. “Mr. Amherst—who gave you this version of Dr. Disbrow’s report?”

“The manager himself.”

“Verbally?”

“No—he showed me Disbrow’s letter.”

For a moment or two they walked on silently through the quiet street; then she said, in a voice still stirred with feeling: “As I told you this afternoon, Dr. Disbrow has said nothing in my hearing.”

“And Mrs. Ogan?”

“Oh, Mrs. Ogan—” Her voice broke in a ripple of irony. “Mrs. Ogan ‘feels it to be such a beautiful dispensation, my dear, that, owing to a death that very morning in the surgical ward, we happened to have a bed ready for the poor man within three hours of the accident.’” She had exchanged her deep throat-tones for a high reedy note which perfectly simulated the matron’s lady-like inflections.

Amherst, at the change, turned on her with a boyish burst of laughter: she joined in it, and for a moment they were blent in that closest of unions, the discovery of a common fund of humour.

She was the first to grow grave. “That three hours’ delay didn’t help matters—how is it there is no emergency hospital at the mills?”

Amherst laughed again, but in a different key. “That’s part of the larger question, which we haven’t time for now.” He waited a moment, and then added: “You’ve not yet given me your own impression of Dillon’s case.”

“You shall have it, if you saw that letter. Dillon will certainly lose his hand—and probably the whole arm.” She spoke with a thrilling of her slight frame that transformed the dispassionate professional into a girl shaken with indignant pity.

Amherst stood still before her. “Good God! Never anything but useless lumber?”

“Never–-“

“And he won’t die?”

“Alas!”

“He has a consumptive wife and three children. She ruined her health swallowing cotton-dust at the factory,” Amherst continued.

“So she told me yesterday.”

He turned in surprise. “You’ve had a talk with her?”

“I went out to Westmore last night. I was haunted by her face when she came to the hospital. She looks forty, but she told me she was only twenty-six.” Miss Brent paused to steady her voice. “It’s the curse of my trade that it’s always tempting me to interfere in cases where I can do no possible good. The fact is, I’m not fit to be a nurse—I shall live and die a wretched sentimentalist!” she ended, with an angry dash at the tears on her veil.

Her companion walked on in silence till she had regained her composure. Then he said: “What did you think of Westmore?”

“I think it’s one of the worst places I ever saw—and I am not unused to slums. It looks so dead. The slums of big cities are much more cheerful.”

He made no answer, and after a moment she asked: “Does the cotton-dust always affect the lungs?”

“It’s likely to, where there is the least phthisical tendency. But of course the harm could be immensely reduced by taking up the old rough floors which hold the dust, and by thorough cleanliness and ventilation.”

“What does the company do in such cases? Where an operative breaks down at twenty-five?”

“The company says there was a phthisical tendency.”

“And will they give nothing in return for the two lives they have taken?”

“They will probably pay for Dillon’s care at the hospital, and they have taken the wife back as a scrubber.”

“To clean those uncleanable floors? She’s not fit for it!”

“She must work, fit for it or not; and there is less strain in scrubbing than in bending over the looms or cards. The pay is lower, of course, but she’s very grateful for being taken back at all, now that she’s no longer a first-class worker.”

Miss Brent’s face glowed with a fine wrath. “She can’t possibly stand more than two or three months of it without breaking down!”

“Well, you see they’ve told her that in less than that time her husband will be at work again.”

“And what will the company do for them when the wife is a hopeless invalid, and the husband a cripple?”

Amherst again uttered the dry laugh with which he had met her suggestion of an emergency hospital. “I know what I should do if I could get anywhere near Dillon—give him an overdose of morphine, and let the widow collect his life-insurance, and make a fresh start.”

She looked at him curiously. “Should you, I wonder?”

“If I saw the suffering as you see it, and knew the circumstances as I know them, I believe I should feel justified—” He broke off. “In your work, don’t you ever feel tempted to set a poor devil free?”

She mused. “One might…but perhaps the professional instinct to save would always come first.”

“To save—what? When all the good of life is gone?”

“I daresay,” she sighed, “poor Dillon would do it himself if he could—when he realizes that all the good is gone.”

“Yes, but he can’t do it himself; and it’s the irony of such cases that his employers, after ruining his life, will do all they can to patch up the ruins.”

“But that at least ought to count in their favour.”

“Perhaps; if—” He paused, as though reluctant to lay himself open once more to the charge of uncharitableness; and suddenly she exclaimed, looking about her: “I didn’t notice we had walked so far down Maplewood Avenue!”

They had turned a few minutes previously into the wide thoroughfare crowning the high ground which is covered by the residential quarter of Hanaford. Here the spacious houses, withdrawn behind shrubberies and lawns, revealed in their silhouettes every form of architectural experiment, from the symmetrical pre-Revolutionary structure, with its classic portico and clipped box-borders, to the latest outbreak in boulders and Moorish tiles.

Amherst followed his companion’s glance with surprise. “We have gone a block or two out of our way. I always forget where I am when I’m talking about anything that interests me.”

Miss Brent looked at her watch. “My friends don’t dine till seven, and I can get home in time by taking a Grove Street car,” she said.

“If you don’t mind walking a little farther you can take a Liberty Street car instead. They run oftener, and you will get home just as soon.”

She made a gesture of assent, and as they walked on he continued: “I haven’t yet explained why I am so anxious to get an unbiassed opinion of Dillon’s case.”

She looked at him in surprise. “What you’ve told me about Dr. Disbrow and your manager is surely enough.”

“Well, hardly, considering that I am Truscomb’s subordinate. I shouldn’t have committed a breach of professional etiquette, or asked you to do so, if I hadn’t a hope of bettering things; but I have, and that is why I’ve held on at Westmore for the last few months, instead of getting out of it altogether.”

“I’m glad of that,” she said quickly.

“The owner of the mills—young Richard Westmore—died last winter,” he went on, “and my hope—it’s no more—is that the new broom may sweep a little cleaner.”

“Who is the new broom?”

“Westmore left everything to his widow, and she is coming here tomorrow to look into the management of the mills.”

“Coming? She doesn’t live here, then?”

“At Hanaford? Heaven forbid! It’s an anomaly nowadays for the employer to live near the employed. The Westmores have always lived in New York—and I believe they have a big place on Long Island.”

“Well, at any rate she is coming, and that ought to be a good sign. Did she never show any interest in the mills during her husband’s life?”

“Not as far as I know. I’ve been at Westmore three years, and she’s not been seen there in my time. She is very young, and Westmore himself didn’t care. It was a case of inherited money. He drew the dividends, and Truscomb did the rest.”

Miss Brent reflected. “I don’t know much about the constitution of companies—but I suppose Mrs. Westmore doesn’t unite all the offices in her own person. Is there no one to stand between Truscomb and the operatives?”

“Oh, the company, on paper, shows the usual official hierarchy. Richard Westmore, of course, was president, and since his death the former treasurer—Halford Gaines—has replaced him, and his son, Westmore Gaines, has been appointed treasurer. You can see by the names that it’s all in the family. Halford Gaines married a Miss Westmore, and represents the clan at Hanaford—leads society, and keeps up the social credit of the name. As treasurer, Mr. Halford Gaines kept strictly to his special business, and always refused to interfere between Truscomb and the operatives. As president he will probably follow the same policy, the more so as it fits in with his inherited respect for the status quo, and his blissful ignorance of economics.”

“And the new treasurer—young Gaines? Is there no hope of his breaking away from the family tradition?”

“Westy Gaines has a better head than his father; but he hates Hanaford and the mills, and his chief object in life is to be taken for a New Yorker. So far he hasn’t been here much, except for the quarterly meetings, and his routine work is done by another cousin—you perceive that Westmore is a nest of nepotism.”

Miss Brent’s work among the poor had developed her interest in social problems, and she followed these details attentively.

“Well, the outlook is not encouraging, but perhaps Mrs. Westmore’s coming will make a change. I suppose she has more power than any one.”

“She might have, if she chose to exert it, for her husband was really the whole company. The official cousins hold only a few shares apiece.”

“Perhaps, then, her visit will open her eyes. Who knows but poor Dillon’s case may help others—prove a beautiful dispensation, as Mrs. Ogan would say?”

“It does come terribly pat as an illustration of some of the abuses I want to have remedied. The difficulty will be to get the lady’s ear. That’s her house we’re coming to, by the way.”

An electric street-lamp irradiated the leafless trees and stone gate-posts of the building before them. Though gardens extended behind it, the house stood so near the pavement that only two short flights of steps intervened between the gate-posts and the portico. Light shone from every window of the pompous rusticated façade—in the turreted “Tuscan villa” style of the ‘fifties—and as Miss Brent and Amherst approached, their advance was checked by a group of persons who were just descending from two carriages at the door.

The lamplight showed every detail of dress and countenance in the party, which consisted of two men, one slightly lame, with a long white moustache and a distinguished nose, the other short, lean and professional, and of two ladies and their laden attendants.

“Why, that must be her party arriving!” Miss Brent exclaimed; and as she spoke the younger of the two ladies, turning back to her maid, exposed to the glare of the electric light a fair pale face shadowed by the projection of her widow’s veil.

“Is that Mrs. Westmore?” Miss Brent whispered; and as Amherst muttered: “I suppose so; I’ve never seen her–-” she continued excitedly: “She looks so like—do you know what her name was before she married?”

He drew his brows together in a hopeless effort of remembrance. “I don’t know—I must have heard—but I never can recall people’s names.”

“That’s bad, for a leader of men!” she said mockingly, and he answered, as though touched on a sore point: “I mean people who don’t count. I never forget an operative’s name or face.”

“One can never tell who may be going to count,” she rejoined sententiously.

He dwelt on this in silence while they walked on catching as they passed a glimpse of the red-carpeted Westmore hall on which the glass doors were just being closed. At length he roused himself to ask: “Does Mrs. Westmore look like some one you know?”

“I fancied so—a girl who was at the Sacred Heart in Paris with me. But isn’t this my corner?” she exclaimed, as they turned into another street, down which a laden car was descending.

Its approach left them time for no more than a hurried hand-clasp, and when Miss Brent had been absorbed into the packed interior her companion, as his habit was, stood for a while where she had left him, gazing at some indefinite point in space; then, waking to a sudden consciousness of his surroundings, he walked off toward the centre of the town.

At the junction of two business streets he met an empty car marked “Westmore,” and springing into it, seated himself in a corner and drew out a pocket Shakespeare. He read on, indifferent to his surroundings, till the car left the asphalt streets and illuminated shop-fronts for a grey intermediate region of mud and macadam. Then he pocketed his volume and sat looking out into the gloom.

The houses grew less frequent, with darker gaps of night between; and the rare street-lamps shone on cracked pavements, crooked telegraph-poles, hoardings tapestried with patent-medicine posters, and all the mean desolation of an American industrial suburb. Farther on there came a weed-grown field or two, then a row of operatives’ houses, the showy gables of the “Eldorado” road-house—the only building in Westmore on which fresh paint was freely lavished—then the company “store,” the machine shops and other out-buildings, the vast forbidding bulk of the factories looming above the river-bend, and the sudden neatness of the manager’s turf and privet hedges. The scene was so familiar to Amherst that he had lost the habit of comparison, and his absorption in the moral and material needs of the workers sometimes made him forget the outward setting of their lives. But tonight he recalled the nurse’s comment—“it looks so dead”—and the phrase roused him to a fresh perception of the scene. With sudden disgust he saw the sordidness of it all—the poor monotonous houses, the trampled grass-banks, the lean dogs prowling in refuse-heaps, the reflection of a crooked gas-lamp in a stagnant loop of the river; and he asked himself how it was possible to put any sense of moral beauty into lives bounded forever by the low horizon of the factory. There is a fortuitous ugliness that has life and hope in it: the ugliness of overcrowded city streets, of the rush and drive of packed activities; but this outspread meanness of the suburban working colony, uncircumscribed by any pressure of surrounding life, and sunk into blank acceptance of its isolation, its banishment from beauty and variety and surprise, seemed to Amherst the very negation of hope and life.

“She’s right,” he mused—“it’s dead—stone dead: there isn’t a drop of wholesome blood left in it.”

The Moosuc River valley, in the hollow of which, for that river’s sake, the Westmore mills had been planted, lingered in the memory of pre-industrial Hanaford as the pleasantest suburb of the town. Here, beyond a region of orchards and farm-houses, several “leading citizens” had placed, above the river-bank, their prim wood-cut “residences,” with porticoes and terraced lawns; and from the chief of these, Hopewood, brought into the Westmore family by the Miss Hope who had married an earlier Westmore, the grim mill-village had been carved. The pillared “residences” had, after this, inevitably fallen to base uses; but the old house at Hopewood, in its wooded grounds, remained, neglected but intact, beyond the first bend of the river, deserted as a dwelling but “held” in anticipation of rising values, when the inevitable growth of Westmore should increase the demand for small building lots. Whenever Amherst’s eyes were refreshed by the hanging foliage above the roofs of Westmore, he longed to convert the abandoned country-seat into a park and playground for the mill-hands; but he knew that the company counted on the gradual sale of Hopewood as a source of profit. No—the mill-town would not grow beautiful as it grew larger—rather, in obedience to the grim law of industrial prosperity, it would soon lose its one lingering grace and spread out in unmitigated ugliness, devouring green fields and shaded slopes like some insect-plague consuming the land. The conditions were familiar enough to Amherst; and their apparent inevitableness mocked the hopes he had based on Mrs. Westmore’s arrival.

“Where every stone is piled on another, through the whole stupid structure of selfishness and egotism, how can one be pulled out without making the whole thing topple? And whatever they’re blind to, they always see that,” he mused, reaching up for the strap of the car.

He walked a few yards beyond the manager’s house, and turned down a side street lined with scattered cottages. Approaching one of these by a gravelled path he pushed open the door, and entered a sitting-room where a green-shaded lamp shone pleasantly on bookshelves and a crowded writing-table.

A brisk little woman in black, laying down the evening paper as she rose, lifted her hands to his tall shoulders.

“Well, mother,” he said, stooping to her kiss.

“You’re late, John,” she smiled back at him, not reproachfully, but with affection.

She was a wonderfully compact and active creature, with face so young and hair so white that she looked as unreal as a stage mother till a close view revealed the fine lines that experience had drawn about her mouth and eyes. The eyes themselves, brightly black and glancing, had none of the veiled depths of her son’s gaze. Their look was outward, on a world which had dealt her hard blows and few favours, but in which her interest was still fresh, amused and unabated.

Amherst glanced at his watch. “Never mind—Duplain will be later still. I had to go into Hanaford, and he is replacing me at the office.”

“So much the better, dear: we can have a minute to ourselves. Sit down and tell me what kept you.”

She picked up her knitting as she spoke, having the kind of hands that find repose in ceaseless small activities. Her son could not remember a time when he had not seen those small hands in motion—shaping garments, darning rents, repairing furniture, exploring the inner economy of clocks. “I make a sort of rag-carpet of the odd minutes,” she had once explained to a friend who wondered at her turning to her needlework in the moment’s interval between other tasks.

Amherst threw himself wearily into a chair. “I was trying to find out something about Dillon’s case,” he said.

His mother turned a quick glance toward the door, rose to close it, and reseated herself.

“Well?”

“I managed to have a talk with his nurse when she went off duty this evening.”

“The nurse? I wonder you could get her to speak.”

“Luckily she’s not the regular incumbent, but a volunteer who happened to be here on a visit. As it was, I had some difficulty in making her talk—till I told her of Disbrow’s letter.”

Mrs. Amherst lifted her bright glance from the needles. “He’s very bad, then?”

“Hopelessly maimed!”

She shivered and cast down her eyes. “Do you suppose she really knows?”

“She struck me as quite competent to judge.”

“A volunteer, you say, here on a visit? What is her name?”

He raised his head with a vague look. “I never thought of asking her.”

Mrs. Amherst laughed. “How like you! Did she say with whom she was staying?”

“I think she said in Oak Street—but she didn’t mention any name.”

Mrs. Amherst wrinkled her brows thoughtfully. “I wonder if she’s not the thin dark girl I saw the other day with Mrs. Harry Dressel. Was she tall and rather handsome?”

“I don’t know,” murmured Amherst indifferently. As a rule he was humorously resigned to his mother’s habit of deserting the general for the particular, and following some irrelevant thread of association in utter disregard of the main issue. But tonight, preoccupied with his subject, and incapable of conceiving how anyone else could be unaffected by it, he resented her indifference as a sign of incurable frivolity.

“How she can live close to such suffering and forget it!” was his thought; then, with a movement of self-reproach, he remembered that the work flying through her fingers was to take shape as a garment for one of the infant Dillons. “She takes her pity out in action, like that quiet nurse, who was as cool as a drum-major till she took off her uniform—and then!” His face softened at the recollection of the girl’s outbreak. Much as he admired, in theory, the woman who kept a calm exterior in emergencies, he had all a man’s desire to know that the springs of feeling lay close to the unruffled surface.

Mrs. Amherst had risen and crossed over to his chair. She leaned on it a moment, pushing the tossed brown hair from his forehead.

“John, have you considered what you mean to do next?”

He threw back his head to meet her gaze.

“About this Dillon case,” she continued. “How are all these investigations going to help you?”

Their eyes rested on each other for a moment; then he said coldly: “You are afraid I am going to lose my place.”

She flushed like a girl and murmured: “It’s not the kind of place I ever wanted to see you in!”

“I know it,” he returned in a gentler tone, clasping one of the hands on his chair-back. “I ought to have followed a profession, like my grandfather; but my father’s blood was too strong in me. I should never have been content as anything but a working-man.”

“How can you call your father a working-man? He had a genius for mechanics, and if he had lived he would have been as great in his way as any statesman or lawyer.”

Amherst smiled. “Greater, to my thinking; but he gave me his hard-working hands without the genius to create with them. I wish I had inherited more from him, or less; but I must make the best of what I am, rather than try to be somebody else.” He laid her hand caressingly against his cheek. “It’s hard on you, mother—but you must bear with me.”

“I have never complained, John; but now you’ve chosen your work, it’s natural that I should want you to stick to it.”

He rose with an impatient gesture. “Never fear; I could easily get another job–-“

“What? If Truscomb blacklisted you? Do you forget that Scotch overseer who was here when we came?”

“And whom Truscomb hounded out of the trade? I remember him,” said Amherst grimly; “but I have an idea I am going to do the hounding this time.”

His mother sighed, but her reply was cut short by the noisy opening of the outer door. Amherst seemed to hear the sound with relief. “There’s Duplain,” he said, going into the passage; but on the threshold he encountered, not the young Alsatian overseer who boarded with them, but a small boy who said breathlessly: “Mr. Truscomb wants you to come down bimeby.”

“This evening? To the office?”

“No—he’s sick a-bed.”

The blood rushed to Amherst’s face, and he had to press his lips close to check an exclamation. “Say I’ll come as soon as I’ve had supper,” he said.

The boy vanished, and Amherst turned back to the sitting-room. “Truscomb’s ill—he has sent for me; and I saw Mrs. Westmore arriving tonight! Have supper, mother—we won’t wait for Duplain.” His face still glowed with excitement, and his eyes were dark with the concentration of his inward vision.

“Oh, John, John!” Mrs. Amherst sighed, crossing the passage to the kitchen.

III

AT the manager’s door Amherst was met by Mrs. Truscomb, a large flushed woman in a soiled wrapper and diamond earrings.

“Mr. Truscomb’s very sick. He ought not to see you. The doctor thinks—” she began.

Dr. Disbrow, at this point, emerged from the sitting-room. He was a pale man, with a beard of mixed grey-and-drab, and a voice of the same indeterminate quality.

“Good evening, Mr. Amherst. Truscomb is pretty poorly—on the edge of pneumonia, I’m afraid. As he seems anxious to see you I think you’d better go up for two minutes—not more, please.” He paused, and went on with a smile: “You won’t excite him, of course—nothing unpleasant–-“

“He’s worried himself sick over that wretched Dillon,” Mrs. Truscomb interposed, draping her wrapper majestically about an indignant bosom.

“That’s it—puts too much heart into his work. But we’ll have Dillon all right before long,” the physician genially declared.

Mrs. Truscomb, with a reluctant gesture, led Amherst up the handsomely carpeted stairs to the room where her husband lay, a prey to the cares of office. She ushered the young man in, and withdrew to the next room, where he heard her coughing at intervals, as if to remind him that he was under observation.

The manager of the Westmore mills was not the type of man that Amherst’s comments on his superior suggested. As he sat propped against the pillows, with a brick-red flush on his cheek-bones, he seemed at first glance to belong to the innumerable army of American business men—the sallow, undersized, lacklustre drudges who have never lifted their heads from the ledger. Even his eye, now bright with fever, was dull and non-committal in daily life; and perhaps only the ramifications of his wrinkles could have revealed what particular ambitions had seamed his soul.

“Good evening, Amherst. I’m down with a confounded cold.”

“I’m sorry to hear it,” the young man forced himself to say.

“Can’t get my breath—that’s the trouble.” Truscomb paused and gasped. “I’ve just heard that Mrs. Westmore is here—and I want you to go round—tomorrow morning—” He had to break off once more.

“Yes, sir,” said Amherst, his heart leaping.

“Needn’t see her—ask for her father, Mr. Langhope. Tell him what the doctor says—I’ll be on my legs in a day or two—ask ‘em to wait till I can take ‘em over the mills.”

He shot one of his fugitive glances at his assistant, and held up a bony hand. “Wait a minute. On your way there, stop and notify Mr. Gaines. He was to meet them here. You understand?”

“Yes, sir,” said Amherst; and at that moment Mrs. Truscomb appeared on the threshold.

“I must ask you to come now, Mr. Amherst,” she began haughtily; but a glance from her husband reduced her to a heaving pink nonentity.

“Hold on, Amherst. I hear you’ve been in to Hanaford. Did you go to the hospital?”

“Ezra—” his wife murmured: he looked through her.

“Yes,” said Amherst.

Truscomb’s face seemed to grow smaller and dryer. He transferred his look from his wife to his assistant.

“All right. You’ll just bear in mind that it’s Disbrow’s business to report Dillon’s case to Mrs. Westmore? You’re to confine yourself to my message. Is that clear?”

“Perfectly clear. Goodnight,” Amherst answered, as he turned to follow Mrs. Truscomb.

That same evening, four persons were seated under the bronze chandelier in the red satin drawing-room of the Westmore mansion. One of the four, the young lady in widow’s weeds whose face had arrested Miss Brent’s attention that afternoon, rose from a massively upholstered sofa and drifted over to the fireplace near which her father sat.

“Didn’t I tell you it was awful, father?” she sighed, leaning despondently against the high carved mantelpiece surmounted by a bronze clock in the form of an obelisk.

Mr. Langhope, who sat smoking, with one faultlessly-clad leg crossed on the other, and his ebony stick reposing against the arm of his chair, raised his clear ironical eyes to her face.

“As an archæologist,” he said, with a comprehensive wave of his hand, “I find it positively interesting. I should really like to come here and dig.”

There were no lamps in the room, and the numerous gas-jets of the chandelier shed their lights impartially on ponderously framed canvases of the Bay of Naples and the Hudson in Autumn, on Carrara busts and bronze Indians on velvet pedestals.

“All this,” murmured Mr. Langhope, “is getting to be as rare as the giant sequoias. In another fifty years we shall have collectors fighting for that Bay of Naples.”

Bessy Westmore turned from him impatiently. When she felt deeply on any subject her father’s flippancy annoyed her.

“You can see, Maria,” she said, seating herself beside the other lady of the party, “why I couldn’t possibly live here.”

Mrs. Eustace Ansell, immediately after dinner, had bent her slender back above the velvet-covered writing-table, where an inkstand of Vienna ormolu offered its empty cup to her pen. Being habitually charged with a voluminous correspondence, she had foreseen this contingency and met it by despatching her maid for her own writing-case, which was now outspread before her in all its complex neatness; but at Bessy’s appeal she wiped her pen, and turned a sympathetic gaze on her companion.

Mrs. Ansell’s face drew all its charm from its adaptability. It was a different face to each speaker: now kindling with irony, now gently maternal, now charged with abstract meditation—and few paused to reflect that, in each case, it was merely the mirror held up to some one else’s view of life.

“It needs doing over,” she admitted, following the widow’s melancholy glance about the room. “But you are a spoilt child to complain. Think of having a house of your own to come to, instead of having to put up at the Hanaford hotel!”

Mrs. Westmore’s attention was arrested by the first part of the reply.

“Doing over? Why in the world should I do it over? No one could expect me to come here now—could they, Mr. Tredegar?” she exclaimed, transferring her appeal to the fourth member of the party.

Mr. Tredegar, the family lawyer, who had deemed it his duty to accompany the widow on her visit of inspection, was strolling up and down the room with short pompous steps, a cigar between his lips, and his arms behind him. He cocked his sparrow-like head, scanned the offending apartment, and terminated his survey by resting his eyes on Mrs. Westmore’s charming petulant face.

“It all depends,” he replied axiomatically, “how large an income you require.”

Mr. Tredegar uttered this remark with the air of one who pronounces on an important point in law: his lightest observation seemed a decision handed down from the bench to which he had never ascended. He restored the cigar to his lips, and sought approval in Mrs. Ansell’s expressive eye.

“Ah, that’s it, Bessy. You’ve that to remember,” the older lady murmured, as if struck by the profundity of the remark.

Mrs. Westmore made an impatient gesture. “We’ve always had money enough—Dick was perfectly satisfied.” Her voice trembled a little on her husband’s name. “And you don’t know what the place is like by daylight—and the people who come to call!”

“Of course you needn’t see any one now, dear,” Mrs. Ansell reminded her, “except the Halford Gaineses.”

“I am sure they’re bad enough. Juliana Gaines will say: ‘My dear, is that the way widows’ veils are worn in New York this autumn?’ and Halford will insist on our going to one of those awful family dinners, all Madeira and terrapin.”

“It’s too early for terrapin,” Mrs. Ansell smiled consolingly; but Bessy had reverted to her argument. “Besides, what difference would my coming here make? I shall never understand anything about business,” she declared.

Mr. Tredegar pondered, and once more removed his cigar. “The necessity has never arisen. But now that you find yourself in almost sole control of a large property–-“

Mr. Langhope laughed gently. “Apply yourself, Bessy. Bring your masterly intellect to bear on the industrial problem.”

Mrs. Ansell restored the innumerable implements to her writing-case, and laid her arm with a caressing gesture on Mrs. Westmore’s shoulder. “Don’t tease her. She’s tired, and she misses the baby.”

“I shall get a telegram tomorrow morning,” exclaimed the young mother, brightening.

“Of course you will. ‘Cicely has just eaten two boiled eggs and a bowl of porridge, and is bearing up wonderfully.’”

She drew Mrs. Westmore persuasively to her feet, but the widow refused to relinquish her hold on her grievance.

“You all think I’m extravagant and careless about money,” she broke out, addressing the room in general from the shelter of Mrs. Ansell’s embrace; “but I know one thing: If I had my way I should begin to economize by selling this horrible house, instead of leaving it shut up from one year’s end to another.”

Her father looked up: proposals of retrenchment always struck him as businesslike when they did not affect his own expenditure. “What do you think of that, eh, Tredegar?”

The eminent lawyer drew in his thin lips. “From the point of view of policy, I think unfavourably of it,” he pronounced.

Bessy’s face clouded, and Mrs. Ansell argued gently: “Really, it’s too late to look so far into the future. Remember, my dear, that we are due at the mills tomorrow at ten.”

The reminder that she must rise early had the effect of hastening Mrs. Westmore’s withdrawal, and the two ladies, after an exchange of goodnights, left the men to their cigars.

Mr. Langhope was the first to speak.

“Bessy’s as hopelessly vague about business as I am, Tredegar. Why the deuce Westmore left her everything outright—but he was only a heedless boy himself.”

“Yes. The way he allowed things to go, it’s a wonder there was anything to leave. This Truscomb must be an able fellow.”

“Devoted to Dick’s interests, I’ve always understood.”

“He makes the mills pay well, at any rate, and that’s not so easy nowadays. But on general principles it’s as well he should see that we mean to look into everything thoroughly. Of course Halford Gaines will never be more than a good figure-head, but Truscomb must be made to understand that Mrs. Westmore intends to interest herself personally in the business.”

“Oh, by all means—of course—” Mr. Langhope assented, his light smile stiffening into a yawn at the mere suggestion.

He rose with an effort, supporting himself on his stick. “I think I’ll turn in myself. There’s not a readable book in that God-forsaken library, and I believe Maria Ansell has gone off with my volume of Loti.”

The next morning, when Amherst presented himself at the Westmore door, he had decided to follow his chief’s instructions to the letter, and ask for Mr. Langhope only. The decision had cost him a struggle, for his heart was big with its purpose; but though he knew that he must soon place himself in open opposition to Truscomb, he recognized the prudence of deferring the declaration of war as long as possible.

On his round of the mills, that morning, he had paused in the room where Mrs. Dillon knelt beside her mop and pail, and had found her, to his surprise, comparatively reassured and cheerful. Dr. Disbrow, she told him, had been in the previous evening, and had told her to take heart about Jim, and left her enough money to get along for a week—and a wonderful new cough-mixture that he’d put up for her special. Amherst found it difficult to listen calmly, with the nurse’s words still in his ears, and the sight before him of Mrs. Dillon’s lean shoulder-blades travelling painfully up and down with the sweep of the mop.

“I don’t suppose that cost Truscomb ten dollars,” he said to himself, as the lift lowered him to the factory door; but another voice argued that he had no right to accuse Disbrow of acting as his brother-in-law’s agent, when the gift to Mrs. Dillon might have been prompted by his own kindness of heart.

“And what prompted the lie about her husband? Well, perhaps he’s an incurable optimist,” he summed up, springing into the Hanaford car.

By the time he reached Mrs. Westmore’s door his wrath had subsided, and he felt that he had himself well in hand. He had taken unusual pains with his appearance that morning—or rather his mother, learning of the errand on which Truscomb had sent him, had laid out his carefully-brushed Sunday clothes, and adjusted his tie with skilful fingers. “You’d really be handsome, Johnny, if you were only a little vainer,” she said, pushing him away to survey the result; and when he stared at her, repeating: “I never heard that vanity made a man better-looking,” she responded gaily: “Oh, up to a certain point, because it teaches him how to use what he’s got. So remember,” she charged him, as he smiled and took up his hat, “that you’re going to see a pretty young woman, and that you’re not a hundred years old yourself.”

“I’ll try to,” he answered, humouring her, “but as I’ve been forbidden to ask for her, I am afraid your efforts will be wasted.”

The servant to whom he gave his message showed him into the library, with a request that he should wait; and there, to his surprise, he found, not the white-moustached gentleman whom he had guessed the night before to be Mr. Langhope, but a young lady in deep black, who turned on him a look of not unfriendly enquiry.

It was not Bessy’s habit to anticipate the clock; but her distaste for her surroundings, and the impatience to have done with the tedious duties awaiting her, had sent her downstairs before the rest of the party. Her life had been so free from tiresome obligations that she had but a small stock of patience to meet them with; and already, after a night at Hanaford, she was pining to get back to the comforts of her own country-house, the soft rut of her daily habits, the funny chatter of her little girl, the long stride of her Irish hunter across the Hempstead plains—to everything, in short, that made it conceivably worth while to get up in the morning.

The servant who ushered in Amherst, thinking the room empty, had not mentioned his name; and for a moment he and his hostess examined each other in silence, Bessy puzzled at the unannounced appearance of a good-looking young man who might have been some one she had met and forgotten, while Amherst felt his self-possession slipping away into the depths of a pair of eyes so dark-lashed and deeply blue that his only thought was one of wonder at his previous indifference to women’s eyes.

“Mrs. Westmore?” he asked, restored to self-command by the perception that his longed-for opportunity was at hand; and Bessy, his voice confirming the inference she had drawn from his appearance, replied with a smile: “I am Mrs. Westmore. But if you have come to see me, I ought to tell you that in a moment I shall be obliged to go out to our mills. I have a business appointment with our manager, but if–-“

She broke off, gracefully waiting for him to insert his explanation.

“I have come from the manager; I am John Amherst—your assistant manager,” he added, as the mention of his name apparently conveyed no enlightenment.

Mrs. Westmore’s face changed, and she let slip a murmur of surprise that would certainly have flattered Amherst’s mother if she could have heard it; but it had an opposite effect on the young man, who inwardly accused himself of having tried to disguise his trade by not putting on his everyday clothes.

“How stupid of me! I took you for—I had no idea; I didn’t expect Mr. Truscomb here,” his employer faltered in embarrassment; then their eyes met and both smiled.

“Mr. Truscomb sent me to tell you that he is ill, and will not be able to show you the mills today. I didn’t mean to ask for you—I was told to give the message to Mr. Langhope,” Amherst scrupulously explained, trying to repress the sudden note of joy in his voice.

He was subject to the unobservant man’s acute flashes of vision, and Mrs. Westmore’s beauty was like a blinding light abruptly turned on eyes subdued to obscurity. As he spoke, his glance passed from her face to her hair, and remained caught in its meshes. He had never seen such hair—it did not seem to grow in the usual orderly way, but bubbled up all over her head in independent clusters of brightness, breaking, about the brow, the temples, the nape, into little irrelevant waves and eddies of light, with dusky hollows of softness where the hand might plunge. It takes but the throb of a nerve to carry such a complex impression from the eye to the mind, but the object of the throb had perhaps felt the electric flash of its passage, for her colour rose while Amherst spoke.

“Ah, here is my father now,” she said with a vague accent of relief, as Mr. Langhope’s stick was heard tapping its way across the hall.

When he entered, accompanied by Mrs. Ansell, his sharp glance of surprise at her visitor told her that he was as much misled as herself, and gave her a sense of being agreeably justified in her blunder. “If father thinks you’re a gentleman–-” her shining eyes seemed to say, as she explained: “This is Mr. Amherst, father: Mr. Truscomb has sent him.”

“Mr. Amherst?” Langhope, with extended hand, echoed affably but vaguely; and it became clear that neither Mrs. Westmore nor her father had ever before heard the name of their assistant manager.

The discovery stung Amherst to a somewhat unreasoning resentment; and while he was trying to subordinate this sentiment to the larger feelings with which he had entered the house, Mrs. Ansell, turning her eyes on him, said gently: “Your name is unusual. I had a friend named Lucy Warne who married a very clever man—a mechanical genius–-“

Amherst’s face cleared. “My father was a genius; and my mother is Lucy Warne,” he said, won by the soft look and the persuasive voice.

“What a delightful coincidence! We were girls together at Albany. You must remember Judge Warne?” she said, turning to Mr. Langhope, who, twirling his white moustache, murmured, a shade less cordially: “Of course—of course—delightful—most interesting.”

Amherst did not notice the difference. His perceptions were already enveloped in the caress that emanated from Mrs. Ansell’s voice and smile; and he only asked himself vaguely if it were possible that this graceful woman, with her sunny autumnal air, could really be his mother’s contemporary. But the question brought an instant reaction of bitterness.

“Poverty is the only thing that makes people old nowadays,” he reflected, painfully conscious of his own share in the hardships his mother had endured; and when Mrs. Ansell went on: “I must go and see her—you must let me take her by surprise,” he said stiffly: “We live out at the mills, a long way from here.”

“Oh, we’re going there this morning,” she rejoined, unrebuffed by what she probably took for a mere social awkwardness, while Mrs. Westmore interposed: “But, Maria, Mr. Truscomb is ill, and has sent Mr. Amherst to say that we are not to come.”

“Yes: so Gaines has just telephoned. It’s most unfortunate,” Mr. Langhope grumbled. He too was already beginning to chafe at the uncongenial exile of Hanaford, and he shared his daughter’s desire to despatch the tiresome business before them.

Mr. Tredegar had meanwhile appeared, and when Amherst had been named to him, and had received his Olympian nod, Bessy anxiously imparted her difficulty.

“But how ill is Mr. Truscomb? Do you think he can take us over the mills tomorrow?” she appealed to Amherst.

“I’m afraid not; I am sure he can’t. He has a touch of bronchitis.”

This announcement was met by a general outcry, in which sympathy for the manager was not the predominating note. Mrs. Ansell saved the situation by breathing feelingly: “Poor man!” and after a decent echo of the phrase, and a doubtful glance at her father, Mrs. Westmore said: “If it’s bronchitis he may be ill for days, and what in the world are we to do?”

“Pack up and come back later,” suggested Mr. Langhope briskly; but while Bessy sighed “Oh, that dreadful journey!” Mr. Tredegar interposed with authority: “One moment, Langhope, please. Mr. Amherst, is Mrs. Westmore expected at the mills?”

“Yes, I believe they know she is coming.”

“Then I think, my dear, that to go back to New York without showing yourself would, under the circumstances, be—er—an error in judgment.”

“Good Lord, Tredegar, you don’t expect to keep us kicking our heels here for days?” her father ejaculated.

“I can certainly not afford to employ mine in that manner for even a fraction of a day,” rejoined the lawyer, always acutely resentful of the suggestion that he had a disengaged moment; “but meanwhile–-“

“Father,” Bessy interposed, with an eagerly flushing cheek, “don’t you see that the only thing for us to do is to go over the mills now—at once—with Mr. Amherst?”

Mr. Langhope stared: he was always adventurously ready to unmake plans, but it flustered him to be called on to remake them. “Eh—what? Now—at once? But Gaines was to have gone with us, and how on earth are we to get at him? He telephoned me that, as the visit was given up, he should ride out to his farm.”

“Oh, never mind—or, at least, all the better!” his daughter urged. “We can see the mills just as well without him; and we shall get on so much more quickly.”

“Well—well—what do you say, Tredegar?” murmured Mr. Langhope, allured by her last argument; and Bessy, clasping her hands, summed up enthusiastically: “And I shall understand so much better without a lot of people trying to explain to me at once!”

Her sudden enthusiasm surprised no one, for even Mrs. Ansell, expert as she was in the interpreting of tones, set it down to the natural desire to have done as quickly as might be with Hanaford.

“Mrs. Westmore has left her little girl at home,” she said to Amherst, with a smile intended to counteract the possible ill-effect of the impression.

But Amherst suspected no slight in his employer’s eagerness to visit Westmore. His overmastering thought was one of joy as the fulness of his opportunity broke on him. To show her the mills himself—to bring her face to face with her people, unhampered by Truscomb’s jealous vigilance, and Truscomb’s false explanations; to see the angel of pity stir the depths of those unfathomable eyes, when they rested, perhaps for the first time, on suffering that it was in their power to smile away as easily as they had smiled away his own distrust—all this the wonderful moment had brought him, and thoughts and arguments thronged so hot on his lips that he kept silence, fearing lest he should say too much.

IV

JOHN AMHERST was no one-sided idealist. He felt keenly the growing complexity of the relation between employer and worker, the seeming hopelessness of permanently harmonizing their claims, the recurring necessity of fresh compromises and adjustments. He hated rant, demagogy, the rash formulating of emotional theories; and his contempt for bad logic and subjective judgments led him to regard with distrust the panaceas offered for the cure of economic evils. But his heart ached for the bitter throes with which the human machine moves on. He felt the menace of industrial conditions when viewed collectively, their poignancy when studied in the individual lives of the toilers among whom his lot was cast; and clearly as he saw the need of a philosophic survey of the question, he was sure that only through sympathy with its personal, human side could a solution be reached. The disappearance of the old familiar contact between master and man seemed to him one of the great wrongs of the new industrial situation. That the breach must be farther widened by the ultimate substitution of the stock-company for the individual employer—a fact obvious to any student of economic tendencies—presented to Amherst’s mind one of the most painful problems in the scheme of social readjustment. But it was characteristic of him to dwell rather on the removal of immediate difficulties than in the contemplation of those to come, and while the individual employer was still to be reckoned with, the main thing was to bring him closer to his workers. Till he entered personally into their hardships and aspirations—till he learned what they wanted and why they wanted it—Amherst believed that no mere law-making, however enlightened, could create a wholesome relation between the two.

This feeling was uppermost as he sat with Mrs. Westmore in the carriage which was carrying them to the mills. He had meant to take the trolley back to Westmore, but at a murmured word from Mr. Tredegar Bessy had offered him a seat at her side, leaving others to follow. This culmination of his hopes—the unlooked-for chance of a half-hour alone with her—left Amherst oppressed with the swiftness of the minutes. He had so much to say—so much to prepare her for—yet how begin, while he was in utter ignorance of her character and her point of view, and while her lovely nearness left him so little chance of perceiving anything except itself?

But he was not often the victim of his sensations, and presently there emerged, out of the very consciousness of her grace and her completeness, a clearer sense of the conditions which, in a measure, had gone to produce them. Her dress could not have hung in such subtle folds, her white chin have nestled in such rich depths of fur, the pearls in her ears have given back the light from such pure curves, if thin shoulders in shapeless gingham had not bent, day in, day out, above the bobbins and carders, and weary ears throbbed even at night with the tumult of the looms. Amherst, however, felt no sensational resentment at the contrast. He had lived too much with ugliness and want not to believe in human nature’s abiding need of their opposite. He was glad there was room for such beauty in the world, and sure that its purpose was an ameliorating one, if only it could be used as a beautiful spirit would use it.

The carriage had turned into one of the nondescript thoroughfares, half incipient street, half decaying lane, which dismally linked the mill-village to Hanaford. Bessy looked out on the ruts, the hoardings, the starved trees dangling their palsied leaves in the radiant October light; then she sighed: “What a good day for a gallop!”

Amherst felt a momentary chill, but the naturalness of the exclamation disarmed him, and the words called up thrilling memories of his own college days, when he had ridden his grandfather’s horses in the famous hunting valley not a hundred miles from Hanaford.

Bessy met his smile with a glow of understanding. “You like riding too, I’m sure?”

“I used to; but I haven’t been in the saddle for years. Factory managers don’t keep hunters,” he said laughing.

Her murmur of embarrassment showed that she took this as an apologetic allusion to his reduced condition, and in his haste to correct this impression he added: “If I regretted anything in my other life, it would certainly be a gallop on a day like this; but I chose my trade deliberately, and I’ve never been sorry for my choice.”

He had hardly spoken when he felt the inappropriateness of this avowal; but her prompt response showed him, a moment later, that it was, after all, the straightest way to his end.

“You find the work interesting? I’m sure it must be. You’ll think me very ignorant—my husband and I came here so seldom…I feel as if I ought to know so much more about it,” she explained.

At last the note for which he waited had been struck. “Won’t you try to—now you’re here? There’s so much worth knowing,” he broke out impetuously.

Mrs. Westmore coloured, but rather with surprise than displeasure. “I’m very stupid—I’ve no head for business—but I will try to,” she said.

“It’s not business that I mean; it’s the personal relation—just the thing the business point of view leaves out. Financially, I don’t suppose your mills could be better run; but there are over seven hundred women working in them, and there’s so much to be done, just for them and their children.”

He caught a faint hint of withdrawal in her tone. “I have always understood that Mr. Truscomb did everything–-“

Amherst flushed; but he was beyond caring for the personal rebuff. “Do you leave it to your little girl’s nurses to do everything for her?” he asked.

Her surprise seemed about to verge on annoyance: he saw the preliminary ruffling of the woman who is put to the trouble of defending her dignity. “Really, I don’t see—” she began with distant politeness; then her face changed and melted, and again her blood spoke for her before her lips.

“I am glad you told me that, Mr. Amherst. Of course I want to do whatever I can. I should like you to point out everything–-“

Amherst’s resolve had been taken while she spoke. He would point out everything, would stretch his opportunity to its limit. All thoughts of personal prudence were flung to the winds—her blush and tone had routed the waiting policy. He would declare war on Truscomb at once, and take the chance of dismissal. At least, before he went he would have brought this exquisite creature face to face with the wrongs from which her luxuries were drawn, and set in motion the regenerating impulses of indignation and pity. He did not stop to weigh the permanent advantage of this course. His only feeling was that the chance would never again be given him—that if he let her go away, back to her usual life, with eyes unopened and heart untouched, there would be no hope of her ever returning. It was far better that he should leave for good, and that she should come back, as come back she must, more and more often, if once she could be made to feel the crying need of her presence.

But where was he to begin? How give her even a glimpse of the packed and intricate situation?

“Mrs. Westmore,” he said, “there’s no time to say much now, but before we get to the mills I want to ask you a favour. If, as you go through them, you see anything that seems to need explaining, will you let me come and tell you about it tonight? I say tonight,” he added, meeting her look of enquiry, “because later—tomorrow even—I might not have the chance. There are some things—a good many—in the management of the mills that Mr. Truscomb doesn’t see as I do. I don’t mean business questions: wages and dividends and so on—those are out of my province. I speak merely in the line of my own work—my care of the hands, and what I believe they need and don’t get under the present system. Naturally, if Mr. Truscomb were well, I shouldn’t have had this chance of putting the case to you; but since it’s come my way, I must seize it and take the consequences.”

Even as he spoke, by a swift reaction of thought, those consequences rose before him in all their seriousness. It was not only, or chiefly, that he feared to lose his place; though he knew his mother had not spoken lightly in instancing the case of the foreman whom Truscomb, to gratify a personal spite, had for months kept out of a job in his trade. And there were special reasons why Amherst should heed her warning. In adopting a manual trade, instead of one of the gentlemanly professions which the men of her family had always followed, he had not only disappointed her hopes, and to a great extent thrown away the benefits of the education she had pinched herself to give him, but had disturbed all the habits of her life by removing her from her normal surroundings to the depressing exile of a factory-settlement. However much he blamed himself for exacting this sacrifice, it had been made so cheerfully that the consciousness of it never clouded his life with his mother; but her self-effacement made him the more alive to his own obligations, and having placed her in a difficult situation he had always been careful not to increase its difficulties by any imprudence in his conduct toward his employers. Yet, grave as these considerations were, they were really less potent than his personal desire to remain at Westmore. Lightly as he had just resolved to risk the chance of dismissal, all his future was bound up in the hope of retaining his place. His heart was in the work at Westmore, and the fear of not being able to get other employment was a small factor in his intense desire to keep his post. What he really wanted was to speak out, and yet escape the consequences: by some miraculous reversal of probability to retain his position and yet effect Truscomb’s removal. The idea was so fantastic that he felt it merely as a quickening of all his activities, a tremendous pressure of will along undetermined lines. He had no wish to take the manager’s place; but his dream was to see Truscomb superseded by a man of the new school, in sympathy with the awakening social movement—a man sufficiently practical to “run” the mills successfully, yet imaginative enough to regard that task as the least of his duties. He saw the promise of such a man in Louis Duplain, the overseer who boarded with Mrs. Amherst: a young fellow of Alsatian extraction, a mill-hand from childhood, who had worked at his trade in Europe as well as in America, and who united with more manual skill, and a greater nearness to the workman’s standpoint, all Amherst’s enthusiasm for the experiments in social betterment that were making in some of the English and continental factories. His strongest wish was to see such a man as Duplain in control at Westmore before he himself turned to the larger work which he had begun to see before him as the sequel to his factory-training.

All these thoughts swept through him in the instant’s pause before Mrs. Westmore, responding to his last appeal, said with a graceful eagerness: “Yes, you must come tonight. I want to hear all you can tell me—and if there is anything wrong you must show me how I can make it better.”

“I’ll show her, and Truscomb shan’t turn me out for it,” was the vow he passionately registered as the carriage drew up at the office-door of the main building.

How this impossible result was to be achieved he had no farther time to consider, for in another moment the rest of the party had entered the factory with them, and speech was followed up in the roar of the machinery.

Amherst’s zeal for his cause was always quickened by the sight of the mills in action. He loved the work itself as much as he hated the conditions under which it was done; and he longed to see on the operatives’ faces something of the ardour that lit up his own when he entered the work-rooms. It was this passion for machinery that at school had turned him from his books, at college had drawn him to the courses least in the line of his destined profession; and it always seized on him afresh when he was face to face with the monstrous energies of the mills. It was not only the sense of power that thrilled him—he felt a beauty in the ordered activity of the whole intricate organism, in the rhythm of dancing bobbins and revolving cards, the swift continuous outpour of doublers and ribbon-laps, the steady ripple of the long ply-frames, the terrible gnashing play of the looms—all these varying subordinate motions, gathered up into the throb of the great engines which fed the giant’s arteries, and were in turn ruled by the invisible action of quick thought and obedient hands, always produced in Amherst a responsive rush of life.

He knew this sensation was too specialized to affect his companions; but he expected Mrs. Westmore to be all the more alive to the other side—the dark side of monotonous human toil, of the banquet of flesh and blood and brain perpetually served up to the monster whose insatiable jaws the looms so grimly typified. Truscomb, as he had told her, was a good manager from the profit-taking standpoint. Since it was profitable to keep the machinery in order, he maintained throughout the factory a high standard of mechanical supervision, except where one or two favoured overseers—for Truscomb was given to favoritism—shirked the duties of their departments. But it was of the essence of Truscomb’s policy—and not the least of the qualities which made him a “paying” manager—that he saved money scrupulously where its outlay would not have resulted in larger earnings. To keep the floors scrubbed, the cotton-dust swept up, the rooms freshly whitewashed and well-ventilated, far from adding the smallest fraction to the quarterly dividends, would have deducted from them the slight cost of this additional labour; and Truscomb therefore economized on scrubbers, sweepers and window-washers, and on all expenses connected with improved ventilation and other hygienic precautions. Though the whole factory was overcrowded, the newest buildings were more carefully planned, and had the usual sanitary improvements; but the old mills had been left in their original state, and even those most recently built were fast lapsing into squalor. It was no wonder, therefore, that workers imprisoned within such walls should reflect their long hours of deadening toil in dull eyes and anæmic skins, and in the dreary lassitude with which they bent to their tasks.

Surely, Amherst argued, Mrs. Westmore must feel this; must feel it all the more keenly, coming from an atmosphere so different, from a life where, as he instinctively divined, all was in harmony with her own graceful person. But a deep disappointment awaited him. He was still under the spell of their last moments in the carriage, when her face and voice had promised so much, when she had seemed so deeply, if vaguely, stirred by his appeal. But as they passed from one resounding room to the other—from the dull throb of the carding-room, the groan of the ply-frames, the long steady pound of the slashers, back to the angry shriek of the fierce unappeasable looms—the light faded from her eyes and she looked merely bewildered and stunned.

Amherst, hardened to the din of the factory, could not measure its effect on nerves accustomed to the subdued sounds and spacious stillnesses which are the last refinement of luxury. Habit had made him unconscious of that malicious multiplication and subdivision of noise that kept every point of consciousness vibrating to a different note, so that while one set of nerves was torn as with pincers by the dominant scream of the looms, others were thrilled with a separate pain by the ceaseless accompaniment of drumming, hissing, grating and crashing that shook the great building. Amherst felt this tumult only as part of the atmosphere of the mills; and to ears trained like his own he could make his voice heard without difficulty. But his attempts at speech were unintelligible to Mrs. Westmore and her companions, and after vainly trying to communicate with him by signs they hurried on as if to escape as quickly as possible from the pursuing whirlwind.

Amherst could not allow for the depressing effect of this enforced silence. He did not see that if Bessy could have questioned him the currents of sympathy might have remained open between them, whereas, compelled to walk in silence through interminable ranks of meaningless machines, to which the human workers seemed mere automatic appendages, she lost all perception of what the scene meant. He had forgotten, too, that the swift apprehension of suffering in others is as much the result of training as the immediate perception of beauty. Both perceptions may be inborn, but if they are not they can be developed only through the discipline of experience.

“That girl in the hospital would have seen it all,” he reflected, as the vision of Miss Brent’s small incisive profile rose before him; but the next moment he caught the light on Mrs. Westmore’s hair, as she bent above a card, and the paler image faded like a late moon in the sunrise.

Meanwhile Mrs. Ansell, seeing that the detailed inspection of the buildings was as trying to Mr. Langhope’s lameness as to his daughter’s nerves, had proposed to turn back with him and drive to Mrs. Amherst’s, where he might leave her to call while the others were completing their rounds. It was one of Mrs. Ansell’s gifts to detect the first symptoms of ennui in her companions, and produce a remedy as patly as old ladies whisk out a scent-bottle or a cough-lozenge; and Mr. Langhope’s look of relief showed the timeliness of her suggestion.

Amherst was too preoccupied to wonder how his mother would take this visit; but he welcomed Mr. Langhope’s departure, hoping that the withdrawal of his ironic smile would leave his daughter open to gentler influences. Mr. Tredegar, meanwhile, was projecting his dry glance over the scene, trying to converse by signs with the overseers of the different rooms, and pausing now and then to contemplate, not so much the workers themselves as the special tasks which engaged them.

How these spectators of the party’s progress were affected by Mrs. Westmore’s appearance, even Amherst, for all his sympathy with their views, could not detect. They knew that she was the new owner, that a disproportionate amount of the result of their toil would in future pass through her hands, spread carpets for her steps, and hang a setting of beauty about her eyes; but the knowledge seemed to produce no special interest in her personality. A change of employer was not likely to make any change in their lot: their welfare would probably continue to depend on Truscomb’s favour. The men hardly raised their heads as Mrs. Westmore passed; the women stared, but with curiosity rather than interest; and Amherst could not tell whether their sullenness reacted on Mrs. Westmore, or whether they were unconsciously chilled by her indifference. The result was the same: the distance between them seemed to increase instead of diminishing; and he smiled ironically to think of the form his appeal had taken—“If you see anything that seems to need explaining.” Why, she saw nothing—nothing but the greasy floor under her feet, the cotton-dust in her eyes, the dizzy incomprehensible whirring of innumerable belts and wheels! Once out of it all, she would make haste to forget the dreary scene without pausing to ask for any explanation of its dreariness.

In the intensity of his disappointment he sought a pretext to cut short the tour of the buildings, that he might remove his eyes from the face he had so vainly watched for any sign of awakening. And then, as he despaired of it, the change came.

They had entered the principal carding-room, and were half-way down its long central passage, when Mr. Tredegar, who led the procession, paused before one of the cards.

“What’s that?” he asked, pointing to a ragged strip of black cloth tied conspicuously to the frame of the card.

The overseer of the room, a florid young man with dissipated eyes, who, at Amherst’s signal, had attached himself to the party, stopped short and turned a furious glance on the surrounding operatives.

“What in hell…? It’s the first I seen of it,” he exclaimed, making an ineffectual attempt to snatch the mourning emblem from its place.

At the same instant the midday whistle boomed through the building, and at the signal the machinery stopped, and silence fell on the mills. The more distant workers at once left their posts to catch up the hats and coats heaped untidily in the corners; but those nearer by, attracted by the commotion around the card, stood spell-bound, fixing the visitors with a dull stare.

Amherst had reddened to the roots of his hair. He knew in a flash what the token signified, and the sight stirred his pity; but it also jarred on his strong sense of discipline, and he turned sternly to the operatives.

“What does this mean?”

There was a short silence; then one of the hands, a thin bent man with mystic eyes, raised his head and spoke.

“We done that for Dillon,” he said.

Amherst’s glance swept the crowded faces. “But Dillon was not killed,” he exclaimed, while the overseer, drawing out his pen-knife, ripped off the cloth and tossed it contemptuously into a heap of cotton-refuse at his feet.

“Might better ha’ been,” came from another hand; and a deep “That’s so” of corroboration ran through the knot of workers.

Amherst felt a touch on his arm, and met Mrs. Westmore’s eyes. “What has happened? What do they mean?” she asked in a startled voice.

“There was an accident here two days ago: a man got caught in the card behind him, and his right hand was badly crushed.”

Mr. Tredegar intervened with his dry note of command. “How serious is the accident? How did it happen?” he enquired.

“Through the man’s own carelessness—ask the manager,” the overseer interposed before Amherst could answer.

A deep murmur of dissent ran through the crowd, but Amherst, without noticing the overseer’s reply, said to Mr. Tredegar: “He’s at the Hope Hospital. He will lose his hand, and probably the whole arm.”

He had not meant to add this last phrase. However strongly his sympathies were aroused, it was against his rule, at such a time, to say anything which might inflame the quick passions of the workers: he had meant to make light of the accident, and dismiss the operatives with a sharp word of reproof. But Mrs. Westmore’s face was close to his: he saw the pity in her eyes, and feared, if he checked its expression, that he might never again have the chance of calling it forth.

“His right arm? How terrible! But then he will never be able to work again!” she exclaimed, in all the horror of a first confrontation with the inexorable fate of the poor.

Her eyes turned from Amherst and rested on the faces pressing about her. There were many women’s faces among them—the faces of fagged middle-age, and of sallow sedentary girlhood. For the first time Mrs. Westmore seemed to feel the bond of blood between herself and these dim creatures of the underworld: as Amherst watched her the lovely miracle was wrought. Her pallour gave way to a quick rush of colour, her eyes widened like a frightened child’s, and two tears rose and rolled slowly down her face.

“Oh, why wasn’t I told? Is he married? Has he children? What does it matter whose fault it was?” she cried, her questions pouring out disconnectedly on a wave of anger and compassion.

“It warn’t his fault…. The cards are too close…. It’ll happen again…. He’s got three kids at home,” broke from the operatives; and suddenly a voice exclaimed “Here’s his wife now,” and the crowd divided to make way for Mrs. Dillon, who, passing through the farther end of the room, had been waylaid and dragged toward the group.

She hung back, shrinking from the murderous machine, which she beheld for the first time since her husband’s accident; then she saw Amherst, guessed the identity of the lady at his side, and flushed up to her haggard forehead. Mrs. Dillon had been good-looking in her earlier youth, and sufficient prettiness lingered in her hollow-cheeked face to show how much more had been sacrificed to sickness and unwholesome toil.

“Oh, ma’am, ma’am, it warn’t Jim’s fault—there ain’t a steadier man living. The cards is too crowded,” she sobbed out.

Some of the other women began to cry: a wave of sympathy ran through the circle, and Mrs. Westmore moved forward with an answering exclamation. “You poor creature…you poor creature….” She opened her arms to Mrs. Dillon, and the scrubber’s sobs were buried on her employer’s breast.

“I will go to the hospital—I will come and see you—I will see that everything is done,” Bessy reiterated. “But why are you here? How is it that you have had to leave your children?” She freed herself to turn a reproachful glance on Amherst. “You don’t mean to tell me that, at such a time, you keep the poor woman at work?”

“Mrs. Dillon has not been working here lately,” Amherst answered. “The manager took her back to-day at her own request, that she might earn something while her husband was in hospital.”

Mrs. Westmore’s eyes shone indignantly. “Earn something? But surely–-“

She met a silencing look from Mr. Tredegar, who had stepped between Mrs. Dillon and herself.

“My dear child, no one doubts—none of these good people doubt—that you will look into the case, and do all you can to alleviate it; but let me suggest that this is hardly the place–-“

She turned from him with an appealing glance at Amherst.

“I think,” the latter said, as their eyes met, “that you had better let me dismiss the hands: they have only an hour at midday.”

She signed her assent, and he turned to the operatives and said quietly: “You have heard Mrs. Westmore’s promise; now take yourselves off, and give her a clear way to the stairs.”

They dropped back, and Mr. Tredegar drew Bessy’s arm through his; but as he began to move away she turned and laid her hand on Mrs. Dillon’s shoulder.

“You must not stay here—you must go back to the children. I will make it right with Mr. Truscomb,” she said in a reassuring whisper; then, through her tears, she smiled a farewell at the lingering knot of operatives, and followed her companions to the door.

In silence they descended the many stairs and crossed the shabby unfenced grass-plot between the mills and the manager’s office. It was not till they reached the carriage that Mrs. Westmore spoke.

“But Maria is waiting for us—we must call for her!” she said, rousing herself; and as Amherst opened the carriage-door she added: “You will show us the way? You will drive with us?”

During the drive Bessy remained silent, as if re-absorbed in the distress of the scene she had just witnessed; and Amherst found himself automatically answering Mr. Tredegar’s questions, while his own mind had no room for anything but the sense of her tremulous lips and of her eyes enlarged by tears. He had been too much engrossed in the momentous issues of her visit to the mills to remember that she had promised to call at his mother’s for Mrs. Ansell; but now that they were on their way thither he found himself wishing that the visit might have been avoided. He was too proud of his mother to feel any doubt of the impression she would produce; but what would Mrs. Westmore think of their way of living, of the cheap jauntiness of the cottage, and the smell of cooking penetrating all its thin partitions? Duplain, too, would be coming in for dinner; and Amherst, in spite of his liking for the young overseer, became conscious of a rather overbearing freedom in his manner, the kind of misplaced ease which the new-made American affects as the readiest sign of equality. All these trifles, usually non-existent or supremely indifferent to Amherst, now assumed a sudden importance, behind which he detected the uneasy desire that Mrs. Westmore should not regard him as less of her own class than his connections and his bringing-up entitled him to be thought. In a flash he saw what he had forfeited by his choice of a calling—equal contact with the little circle of people who gave life its crowning grace and facility; and the next moment he was blushing at this reversal of his standards, and wondering, almost contemptuously, what could be the nature of the woman whose mere presence could produce such a change.

But there was no struggling against her influence; and as, the night before, he had looked at Westmore with the nurse’s eyes, so he now found himself seeing his house as it must appear to Mrs. Westmore. He noticed the shabby yellow paint of the palings, the neglected garden of their neighbour, the week’s wash flaunting itself indecently through the denuded shrubs about the kitchen porch; and as he admitted his companions to the narrow passage he was assailed by the expected whiff of “boiled dinner,” with which the steam of wash-tubs was intimately mingled.

Duplain was in the passage; he had just come out of the kitchen, and the fact that he had been washing his hands in the sink was made evident by his rolled-back shirt-sleeves, and by the shiny redness of the knuckles he was running through his stiff black hair.

“Hallo, John,” he said, in his aggressive voice, which rose abruptly at sight of Amherst’s companions; and at the same moment the frowsy maid-of-all-work, crimson from stooping over the kitchen stove, thrust her head out to call after him: “See here, Mr. Duplain, don’t you leave your cravat laying round in my dough.”

V

MRS. WESTMORE stayed just long enough not to break in too abruptly on the flow of her friend’s reminiscences, and to impress herself on Mrs. Amherst’s delighted eyes as an embodiment of tactfulness and grace—looking sympathetically about the little room, which, with its books, its casts, its photographs of memorable pictures, seemed, after all, a not incongruous setting to her charms; so that when she rose to go, saying, as her hand met Amherst’s, “Tonight, then, you must tell me all about those poor Dillons,” he had the sense of having penetrated so far into her intimacy that a new Westmore must inevitably result from their next meeting.

“Say, John—the boss is a looker,” Duplain commented across the dinner-table, with the slangy grossness he sometimes affected; but Amherst left it to his mother to look a quiet rebuke, feeling himself too aloof from such contacts to resent them.

He had to rouse himself with an effort to take in the overseer’s next observation. “There was another lady at the office this morning,” Duplain went on, while the two men lit their cigars in the porch. “Asking after you—tried to get me to show her over the mills when I said you were busy.”

“Asking after me? What did she look like?”

“Well, her face was kinder white and small, with an awful lot of black hair fitting close to it. Said she came from Hope Hospital.”

Amherst looked up. “Did you show her over?” he asked with sudden interest.

Duplain laughed slangily. “What? Me? And have Truscomb get on to it and turn me down? How’d I know she wasn’t a yellow reporter?”

Amherst uttered an impatient exclamation. “I wish to heaven a yellow reporter would go through these mills, and show them up in head-lines a yard high!”

He regretted not having seen the nurse again: he felt sure she would have been interested in the working of the mills, and quick to notice the signs of discouragement and ill-health in the workers’ faces; but a moment later his regret was dispelled by the thought of his visit to Mrs. Westmore. The afternoon hours dragged slowly by in the office, where he was bound to his desk by Truscomb’s continued absence; but at length the evening whistle blew, the clerks in the outer room caught their hats from the rack, Duplain presented himself with the day’s report, and the two men were free to walk home.

Two hours later Amherst was mounting Mrs. Westmore’s steps; and his hand was on the bell when the door opened and Dr. Disbrow came out. The physician drew back, as if surprised and slightly disconcerted; but his smile promptly effaced all signs of vexation, and he held his hand out affably.

“A fine evening, Mr. Amherst. I’m glad to say I have been able to bring Mrs. Westmore an excellent report of both patients—Mr. Truscomb, I mean, and poor Dillon. This mild weather is all in their favour, and I hope my brother-in-law will be about in a day or two.” He passed on with a nod.

Amherst was once more shown into the library where he had found Mrs. Westmore that morning; but on this occasion it was Mr. Tredegar who rose to meet him, and curtly waved him to a seat at a respectful distance from his own. Amherst at once felt a change of atmosphere, and it was easy to guess that the lowering of temperature was due to Dr. Disbrow’s recent visit. The thought roused the young man’s combative instincts, and caused him to say, as Mr. Tredegar continued to survey him in silence from the depths of a capacious easy-chair: “I understood from Mrs. Westmore that she wished to see me this evening.”

It was the wrong note, and he knew it; but he had been unable to conceal his sense of the vague current of opposition in the air.

“Quite so: I believe she asked you to come,” Mr. Tredegar assented, laying his hands together vertically, and surveying Amherst above the acute angle formed by his parched finger-tips. As he leaned back, small, dry, dictatorial, in the careless finish of his evening dress and pearl-studded shirt-front, his appearance put the finishing touch to Amherst’s irritation. He felt the incongruousness of his rough clothes in this atmosphere of after-dinner ease, the mud on his walking-boots, the clinging cotton-dust which seemed to have entered into the very pores of the skin; and again his annoyance escaped in his voice.

“Perhaps I have come too early—” he began; but Mr. Tredegar interposed with glacial amenity: “No, I believe you are exactly on time; but Mrs. Westmore is unexpectedly detained. The fact is, Mr. and Mrs. Halford Gaines are dining with her, and she has delegated to me the duty of hearing what you have to say.”

Amherst hesitated. His impulse was to exclaim: “There is no duty about it!” but a moment’s thought showed the folly of thus throwing up the game. With the prospect of Truscomb’s being about again in a day or two, it might well be that this was his last chance of reaching Mrs. Westmore’s ear; and he was bound to put his case while he could, irrespective of personal feeling. But his disappointment was too keen to be denied, and after a pause he said: “Could I not speak with Mrs. Westmore later?”

Mr. Tredegar’s cool survey deepened to a frown. The young man’s importunity was really out of proportion to what he signified. “Mrs. Westmore has asked me to replace her,” he said, putting his previous statement more concisely.

“Then I am not to see her at all?” Amherst exclaimed; and the lawyer replied indifferently: “I am afraid not, as she leaves tomorrow.”

Mr. Tredegar was in his element when refusing a favour. Not that he was by nature unkind; he was, indeed, capable of a cold beneficence; but to deny what it was in his power to accord was the readiest way of proclaiming his authority, that power of loosing and binding which made him regard himself as almost consecrated to his office.

Having sacrificed to this principle, he felt free to add as a gratuitous concession to politeness: “You are perhaps not aware that I am Mrs. Westmore’s lawyer, and one of the executors under her husband’s will.”

He dropped this negligently, as though conscious of the absurdity of presenting his credentials to a subordinate; but his manner no longer incensed Amherst: it merely strengthened his resolve to sink all sense of affront in the supreme effort of obtaining a hearing.

“With that stuffed canary to advise her,” he reflected, “there’s no hope for her unless I can assert myself now”; and the unconscious wording of his thought expressed his inward sense that Bessy Westmore stood in greater need of help than her work-people.

Still he hesitated, hardly knowing how to begin. To Mr. Tredegar he was no more than an underling, without authority to speak in his superior’s absence; and the lack of an official warrant, which he could have disregarded in appealing to Mrs. Westmore, made it hard for him to find a good opening in addressing her representative. He saw, too, from Mr. Tredegar’s protracted silence, that the latter counted on the effect of this embarrassment, and was resolved not to minimize it by giving him a lead; and this had the effect of increasing his caution.

He looked up and met the lawyer’s eye. “Mrs. Westmore,” he began, “asked me to let her know something about the condition of the people at the mills–-“

Mr. Tredegar raised his hand. “Excuse me,” he said. “I understood from Mrs. Westmore that it was you who asked her permission to call this evening and set forth certain grievances on the part of the operatives.”

Amherst reddened. “I did ask her—yes. But I don’t in any sense represent the operatives. I simply wanted to say a word for them.”

Mr. Tredegar folded his hands again, and crossed one lean little leg over the other, bringing into his line of vision the glossy tip of a patent-leather pump, which he studied for a moment in silence.

“Does Mr. Truscomb know of your intention?” he then enquired.

“No, sir,” Amherst answered energetically, glad that he had forced the lawyer out of his passive tactics. “I am here on my own responsibility—and in direct opposition to my own interests,” he continued with a slight smile. “I know that my proceeding is quite out of order, and that I have, personally, everything to lose by it, and in a larger way probably very little to gain; but I thought Mrs. Westmore’s attention ought to be called to certain conditions at the mills, and no one else seemed likely to speak of them.”

“May I ask why you assume that Mr. Truscomb will not do so when he has the opportunity?”

Amherst could not repress a smile. “Because it is owing to Mr. Truscomb that they exist.”

“The real object of your visit then,” said Mr. Tredegar, speaking with deliberation, “is—er—an underhand attack on your manager’s methods?”

Amherst’s face darkened, but he kept his temper. “I see nothing especially underhand in my course–-“

“Except,” the other interposed ironically, “that you have waited to speak till Mr. Truscomb was not in a position to defend himself.”

“I never had the chance before. It was at Mrs. Westmore’s own suggestion that I took her over the mills, and feeling as I do I should have thought it cowardly to shirk the chance of pointing out to her the conditions there.”

Mr. Tredegar mused, his eyes still bent on his gently-oscillating foot. Whenever a sufficient pressure from without parted the fog of self-complacency in which he moved, he had a shrewd enough outlook on men and motives; and it may be that the vigorous ring of Amherst’s answer had effected this momentary clearing of the air.

At any rate, his next words were spoken in a more accessible tone. “To what conditions do you refer?”

“To the conditions under which the mill-hands work and live—to the whole management of the mills, in fact, in relation to the people employed.”

“That is a large question. Pardon my possible ignorance—” Mr. Tredegar paused to make sure that his hearer took in the full irony of this—“but surely in this state there are liability and inspection laws for the protection of the operatives?”

“There are such laws, yes—but most of them are either a dead letter, or else so easily evaded that no employer thinks of conforming to them.”

“No employer? Then your specific charge against the Westmore mills is part of a general arraignment of all employers of labour?”

“By no means, sir. I only meant that, where the hands are well treated, it is due rather to the personal good-will of the employer than to any fear of the law.”

“And in what respect do you think the Westmore hands unfairly treated?”

Amherst paused to measure his words. “The question, as you say, is a large one,” he rejoined. “It has its roots in the way the business is organized—in the traditional attitude of the company toward the operatives. I hoped that Mrs. Westmore might return to the mills—might visit some of the people in their houses. Seeing their way of living, it might have occurred to her to ask a reason for it—and one enquiry would have led to another. She spoke this morning of going to the hospital to see Dillon.”

“She did go to the hospital: I went with her. But as Dillon was sleeping, and as the matron told us he was much better—a piece of news which, I am happy to say, Dr. Disbrow has just confirmed—she did not go up to the ward.”

Amherst was silent, and Mr. Tredegar pursued: “I gather, from your bringing up Dillon’s case, that for some reason you consider it typical of the defects you find in Mr. Truscomb’s management. Suppose, therefore, we drop generalizations, and confine ourselves to the particular instance. What wrong, in your view, has been done the Dillons?”

He turned, as he spoke, to extract a cigar from the box at his elbow. “Let me offer you one, Mr. Amherst: we shall talk more comfortably,” he suggested with distant affability; but Amherst, with a gesture of refusal, plunged into his exposition of the Dillon case. He tried to put the facts succinctly, presenting them in their bare ugliness, without emotional drapery; setting forth Dillon’s good record for sobriety and skill, dwelling on the fact that his wife’s ill-health was the result of perfectly remediable conditions in the work-rooms, and giving his reasons for the belief that the accident had been caused, not by Dillon’s carelessness, but by the overcrowding of the carding-room. Mr. Tredegar listened attentively, though the cloud of cigar-smoke between himself and Amherst masked from the latter his possible changes of expression. When he removed his cigar, his face looked smaller than ever, as though desiccated by the fumes of the tobacco.

“Have you ever called Mr. Gaines’s attention to these matters?”

“No: that would have been useless. He has always refused to discuss the condition of the mills with any one but the manager.”

“H’m—that would seem to prove that Mr. Gaines, who lives here, sees as much reason for trusting Truscomb’s judgment as Mr. Westmore, who delegated his authority from a distance.”

Amherst did not take this up, and after a pause Mr. Tredegar went on: “You know, of course, the answers I might make to such an indictment. As a lawyer, I might call your attention to the employé‘s waiver of risk, to the strong chances of contributory negligence, and so on; but happily in this case such arguments are superfluous. You are apparently not aware that Dillon’s injury is much slighter than it ought to be to serve your purpose. Dr. Disbrow has just told us that he will probably get off with the loss of a finger; and I need hardly say that, whatever may have been Dillon’s own share in causing the accident—and as to this, as you admit, opinions differ—Mrs. Westmore will assume all the expenses of his nursing, besides making a liberal gift to his wife.” Mr. Tredegar laid down his cigar and drew forth a silver-mounted note-case. “Here, in fact,” he continued, “is a cheque which she asks you to transmit, and which, as I think you will agree, ought to silence, on your part as well as Mrs. Dillon’s, any criticism of Mrs. Westmore’s dealings with her operatives.”

The blood rose to Amherst’s forehead, and he just restrained himself from pushing back the cheque which Mr. Tredegar had laid on the table between them.

“There is no question of criticizing Mrs. Westmore’s dealings with her operatives—as far as I know, she has had none as yet,” he rejoined, unable to control his voice as completely as his hand. “And the proof of it is the impunity with which her agents deceive her—in this case, for instance, of Dillon’s injury. Dr. Disbrow, who is Mr. Truscomb’s brother-in-law, and apt to be influenced by his views, assures you that the man will get off with the loss of a finger; but some one equally competent to speak told me last night that he would lose not only his hand but his arm.”

Amherst’s voice had swelled to a deep note of anger, and with his tossed hair, and eyes darkening under furrowed brows, he presented an image of revolutionary violence which deepened the disdain on Mr. Tredegar’s lip.

“Some one equally competent to speak? Are you prepared to name this anonymous authority?”

Amherst hesitated. “No—I shall have to ask you to take my word for it,” he returned with a shade of embarrassment.

“Ah—” Mr. Tredegar murmured, giving to the expressive syllable its utmost measure of decent exultation.

Amherst quivered under the thin lash, and broke out: “It is all you have required of Dr. Disbrow—” but at this point Mr. Tredegar rose to his feet.

“My dear sir, your resorting to such arguments convinces me that nothing is to be gained by prolonging our talk. I will not even take up your insinuations against two of the most respected men in the community—such charges reflect only on those who make them.”

Amherst, whose flame of anger had subsided with the sudden sense of its futility, received this in silence, and the lawyer, reassured, continued with a touch of condescension: “My only specific charge from Mrs. Westmore was to hand you this cheque; but, in spite of what has passed, I take it upon myself to add, in her behalf, that your conduct of today will not be allowed to weigh against your record at the mills, and that the extraordinary charges you have seen fit to bring against your superiors will—if not repeated—simply be ignored.”

When, the next morning at about ten, Mrs. Eustace Ansell joined herself to the two gentlemen who still lingered over a desultory breakfast in Mrs. Westmore’s dining-room, she responded to their greeting with less than her usual vivacity.

[Illustration: “No—I shall have to ask you to take my word for it.”]

It was one of Mrs. Ansell’s arts to bring to the breakfast-table just the right shade of sprightliness, a warmth subdued by discretion as the early sunlight is tempered by the lingering coolness of night. She was, in short, as fresh, as temperate, as the hour, yet without the concomitant chill which too often marks its human atmosphere: rather her soft effulgence dissipated the morning frosts, opening pinched spirits to a promise of midday warmth. But on this occasion a mist of uncertainty hung on her smile, and veiled the glance which she turned on the contents of the heavy silver dishes successively presented to her notice. When, at the conclusion of this ceremony, the servants had withdrawn, she continued for a moment to stir her tea in silence, while her glance travelled from Mr. Tredegar, sunk in his morning mail, to Mr. Langhope, who leaned back resignedly in his chair, trying to solace himself with Hanaford Banner, till midday should bring him a sight of the metropolitan press.

“I suppose you know,” she said suddenly, “that Bessy has telegraphed for Cicely, and made her arrangements to stay here another week.”

Mr. Langhope’s stick slipped to the floor with the sudden displacement of his whole lounging person, and Mr. Tredegar, removing his tortoise-shell reading-glasses, put them hastily into their case, as though to declare for instant departure.

“My dear Maria—” Mr. Langhope gasped, while she rose and restored his stick.

“She considers it, then, her duty to wait and see Truscomb?” the lawyer asked; and Mrs. Ansell, regaining her seat, murmured discreetly: “She puts it so—yes.”

“My dear Maria—” Mr. Langhope repeated helplessly, tossing aside his paper and drawing his chair up to the table.

“But it would be perfectly easy to return: it is quite unnecessary to wait here for his recovery,” Mr. Tredegar pursued, as though setting forth a fact which had not hitherto presented itself to the more limited intelligence of his hearers.

Mr. Langhope emitted a short laugh, and Mrs. Ansell answered gently: “She says she detests the long journey.”

Mr. Tredegar rose and gathered up his letters with a gesture of annoyance. “In that case—if I had been notified earlier of this decision, I might have caught the morning train,” he interrupted himself, glancing resentfully at his watch.

“Oh, don’t leave us, Tredegar,” Mr. Langhope entreated. “We’ll reason with her—we’ll persuade her to go back by the three-forty.”

Mrs. Ansell smiled. “She telegraphed at seven. Cicely and the governess are already on their way.”

“At seven? But, my dear friend, why on earth didn’t you tell us?”

“I didn’t know till a few minutes ago. Bessy called me in as I was coming down.”

“Ah—” Mr. Langhope murmured, meeting her eyes for a fraction of a second. In the encounter, she appeared to communicate something more than she had spoken, for as he stooped to pick up his paper he said, more easily: “My dear Tredegar, if we’re in a box there’s no reason why we should force you into it too. Ring for Ropes, and we’ll look up a train for you.”

Mr. Tredegar appeared slightly ruffled at this prompt acquiescence in his threatened departure. “Of course, if I had been notified in advance, I might have arranged to postpone my engagements another day; but in any case, it is quite out of the question that I should return in a week—and quite unnecessary,” he added, snapping his lips shut as though he were closing his last portmanteau.

“Oh, quite—quite,” Mr. Langhope assented. “It isn’t, in fact, in the least necessary for any of us either to stay on now or to return. Truscomb could come to Long Island when he recovers, and answer any questions we may have to put; but if Bessy has sent for the child, we must of course put off going for today—at least I must,” he added sighing, “and, though I know it’s out of the question to exact such a sacrifice from you, I have a faint hope that our delightful friend here, with the altruistic spirit of her sex–-“

“Oh, I shall enjoy it—my maid is unpacking,” Mrs. Ansell gaily affirmed; and Mr. Tredegar, shrugging his shoulders, said curtly: “In that case I will ring for the time-table.”

When he had withdrawn to consult it in the seclusion of the library, and Mrs. Ansell, affecting a sudden desire for a second cup of tea, had reseated herself to await the replenishment of the kettle, Mr. Langhope exchanged his own chair for a place at her side.

“Now what on earth does this mean?” he asked, lighting a cigarette in response to her slight nod of consent.

Mrs. Ansell’s gaze lost itself in the depths of the empty tea-pot.

“A number of things—or any one of them,” she said at length, extending her arm toward the tea-caddy.

“For instance—?” he rejoined, following appreciatively the movements of her long slim hands.

She raised her head and met his eyes. “For instance: it may mean—don’t resent the suggestion—that you and Mr. Tredegar were not quite well-advised in persuading her not to see Mr. Amherst yesterday evening.”

Mr. Langhope uttered an exclamation of surprise.

“But, my dear Maria—in the name of reason…why, after the doctor’s visit—after his coming here last night, at Truscomb’s request, to put the actual facts before her—should she have gone over the whole business again with this interfering young fellow? How, in fact, could she have done so,” he added, after vainly waiting for her reply, “without putting a sort of slight on Truscomb, who is, after all, the only person entitled to speak with authority?”

Mrs. Ansell received his outburst in silence, and the butler, reappearing with the kettle and fresh toast, gave her the chance to prolong her pause for a full minute. When the door had closed on him, she said: “Judged by reason, your arguments are unanswerable; but when it comes to a question of feeling–-“

“Feeling? What kind of feeling? You don’t mean to suggest anything so preposterous as that Bessy–-?”

She made a gesture of smiling protest. “I confess it is to be regretted that his mother is a lady, and that he looks—you must have noticed it?—so amazingly like the portraits of the young Schiller. But I only meant that Bessy forms all her opinions emotionally; and that she must have been very strongly affected by the scene Mr. Tredegar described to us.”

“Ah,” Mr. Langhope interjected, replying first to her parenthesis, “how a woman of your good sense stumbled on that idea of hunting up the mother—!” but Mrs. Ansell answered, with a slight grimace: “My dear Henry, if you could see the house they live in you’d think I had been providentially guided there!” and, reverting to the main issue, he went on fretfully: “But why, after hearing the true version of the facts, should Bessy still be influenced by that sensational scene? Even if it was not, as Tredegar suspects, cooked up expressly to take her in, she must see that the hospital doctor is, after all, as likely as any one to know how the accident really happened, and how seriously the fellow is hurt.”

“There’s the point. Why should Bessy believe Dr. Disbrow rather than Mr. Amherst?”

“For the best of reasons—because Disbrow has nothing to gain by distorting the facts, whereas this young Amherst, as Tredegar pointed out, has the very obvious desire to give Truscomb a bad name and shove himself into his place.”

Mrs. Ansell contemplatively turned the rings upon her fingers. “From what I saw of Amherst I’m inclined to think that, if that is his object, he is too clever to have shown his hand so soon. But if you are right, was there not all the more reason for letting Bessy see him and find out as soon as possible what he was aiming at?”

“If one could have trusted her to find out—but you credit my poor child with more penetration than I’ve ever seen in her.”

“Perhaps you’ve looked for it at the wrong time—and about the wrong things. Bessy has the penetration of the heart.”

“The heart! You make mine jump when you use such expressions.”

“Oh, I use this one in a general sense. But I want to help you to keep it from acquiring a more restricted significance.”

“Restricted—to the young man himself?”

Mrs. Ansell’s expressive hands seemed to commit the question to fate. “All I ask you to consider for the present is that Bessy is quite unoccupied and excessively bored.”

“Bored? Why, she has everything on earth she can want!”

“The ideal state for producing boredom—the only atmosphere in which it really thrives. And besides—to be humanly inconsistent—there’s just one thing she hasn’t got.”

“Well?” Mr. Langhope groaned, fortifying himself with a second cigarette.

“An occupation for that rudimentary little organ, the mention of which makes you jump.”

“There you go again! Good heavens, Maria, do you want to encourage her to fall in love?”

“Not with a man, just at present, but with a hobby, an interest, by all means. If she doesn’t, the man will take the place of the interest—there’s a vacuum to be filled, and human nature abhors a vacuum.”

Mr. Langhope shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t follow you. She adored her husband.”

His friend’s fine smile was like a magnifying glass silently applied to the gross stupidity of his remark. “Oh, I don’t say it was a great passion—but they got on perfectly,” he corrected himself.

“So perfectly that you must expect her to want a little storm and stress for a change. The mere fact that you and Mr. Tredegar objected to her seeing Mr. Amherst last night has roused the spirit of opposition in her. A year ago she hadn’t any spirit of opposition.”

“There was nothing for her to oppose—poor Dick made her life so preposterously easy.”

“My ingenuous friend! Do you still think that’s any reason? The fact is, Bessy wasn’t awake, she wasn’t even born, then…. She is now, and you know the infant’s first conscious joy is to smash things.”

“It will be rather an expensive joy if the mills are the first thing she smashes.”

“Oh I imagine the mills are pretty substantial. I should, I own,” Mrs. Ansell smiled, “not object to seeing her try her teeth on them.”

“Which, in terms of practical conduct, means–-?”

“That I advise you not to disapprove of her staying on, or of her investigating the young man’s charges. You must remember that another peculiarity of the infant mind is to tire soonest of the toy that no one tries to take away from it.”

“Que diable! But suppose Truscomb turns rusty at this very unusual form of procedure? Perhaps you don’t quite know how completely he represents the prosperity of the mills.”

“All the more reason,” Mrs. Ansell persisted, rising at the sound of Mr. Tredegar’s approach. “For don’t you perceive, my poor distracted friend, that if Truscomb turns rusty, as he undoubtedly will, the inevitable result will be his manager’s dismissal—and that thereafter there will presumably be peace in Warsaw?”

“Ah, you divinely wicked woman!” cried Mr. Langhope, snatching at an appreciative pressure of her hand as the lawyer reappeared in the doorway. VI

BEFORE daylight that same morning Amherst, dressing by the gas-flame above his cheap wash-stand, strove to bring some order into his angry thoughts. It humbled him to feel his purpose tossing rudderless on unruly waves of emotion, yet strive as he would he could not regain a hold on it. The events of the last twenty-four hours had been too rapid and unexpected for him to preserve his usual clear feeling of mastery; and he had, besides, to reckon with the first complete surprise of his senses. His way of life had excluded him from all contact with the subtler feminine influences, and the primitive side of the relation left his imagination untouched. He was therefore the more assailable by those refined forms of the ancient spell that lurk in delicacy of feeling interpreted by loveliness of face. By his own choice he had cut himself off from all possibility of such communion; had accepted complete abstinence for that part of his nature which might have offered a refuge from the stern prose of his daily task. But his personal indifference to his surroundings—deliberately encouraged as a defiance to the attractions of the life he had renounced—proved no defence against this appeal; rather, the meanness of his surroundings combined with his inherited refinement of taste to deepen the effect of Bessy’s charm.

As he reviewed the incidents of the past hours, a reaction of self-derision came to his aid. What was this exquisite opportunity from which he had cut himself off? What, to reduce the question to a personal issue, had Mrs. Westmore said or done that, on the part of a plain woman, would have quickened his pulses by the least fraction of a second? Why, it was only the old story of the length of Cleopatra’s nose! Because her eyes were a heavenly vehicle for sympathy, because her voice was pitched to thrill the tender chords, he had been deluded into thinking that she understood and responded to his appeal. And her own emotions had been wrought upon by means as cheap: it was only the obvious, theatrical side of the incident that had affected her. If Dillon’s wife had been old and ugly, would she have been clasped to her employer’s bosom? A more expert knowledge of the sex would have told Amherst that such ready sympathy is likely to be followed by as prompt a reaction of indifference. Luckily Mrs. Westmore’s course had served as a corrective for his lack of experience; she had even, as it appeared, been at some pains to hasten the process of disillusionment. This timely discipline left him blushing at his own insincerity; for he now saw that he had risked his future not because of his zeal for the welfare of the mill-hands, but because Mrs. Westmore’s look was like sunshine on his frozen senses, and because he was resolved, at any cost, to arrest her attention, to associate himself with her by the only means in his power.

Well, he deserved to fail with such an end in view; and the futility of his scheme was matched by the vanity of his purpose. In the cold light of disenchantment it seemed as though he had tried to build an impregnable fortress out of nursery blocks. How could he have foreseen anything but failure for so preposterous an attempt? His breach of discipline would of course be reported at once to Mr. Gaines and Truscomb; and the manager, already jealous of his assistant’s popularity with the hands, which was a tacit criticism of his own methods, would promptly seize the pretext to be rid of him. Amherst was aware that only his technical efficiency, and his knack of getting the maximum of work out of the operatives, had secured him from Truscomb’s animosity. From the outset there had been small sympathy between the two; but the scarcity of competent and hard-working assistants had made Truscomb endure him for what he was worth to the mills. Now, however, his own folly had put the match to the manager’s smouldering dislike, and he saw himself, in consequence, discharged and blacklisted, and perhaps roaming for months in quest of a job. He knew the efficiency of that far-reaching system of defamation whereby the employers of labour pursue and punish the subordinate who incurs their displeasure. In the case of a mere operative this secret persecution often worked complete ruin; and even to a man of Amherst’s worth it opened the dispiriting prospect of a long struggle for rehabilitation.

Deep down, he suffered most at the thought that his blow for the operatives had failed; but on the surface it was the manner of his failure that exasperated him. For it seemed to prove him unfit for the very work to which he was drawn: that yearning to help the world forward that, in some natures, sets the measure to which the personal adventure must keep step. Amherst had hitherto felt himself secured by his insight and self-control from the emotional errors besetting the way of the enthusiast; and behold, he had stumbled into the first sentimental trap in his path, and tricked his eyes with a Christmas-chromo vision of lovely woman dispensing coals and blankets! Luckily, though such wounds to his self-confidence cut deep, he could apply to them the antiseptic of an unfailing humour; and before he had finished dressing, the picture of his wide schemes of social reform contracting to a blue-eyed philanthropy of cheques and groceries, had provoked a reaction of laughter. Perhaps the laughter came too soon, and rang too loud, to be true to the core; but at any rate it healed the edges of his hurt, and gave him a sound surface of composure.

But he could not laugh away the thought of the trials to which his intemperance had probably exposed his mother; and when, at the breakfast-table, from which Duplain had already departed, she broke into praise of their visitor, it was like a burning irritant on his wound.

“What a face, John! Of course I don’t often see people of that kind now—” the words, falling from her too simply to be reproachful, wrung him, for that, all the more—“but I’m sure that kind of soft loveliness is rare everywhere; like a sweet summer morning with the mist on it. The Gaines girls, now, are my idea of the modern type; very handsome, of course, but you see just how handsome the first minute. I like a story that keeps one wondering till the end. It was very kind of Maria Ansell,” Mrs. Amherst wandered happily on, “to come and hunt me out yesterday, and I enjoyed our quiet talk about old times. But what I liked best was seeing Mrs. Westmore—and, oh, John, if she came to live here, what a benediction to the mills!”

Amherst was silent, moved most of all by the unimpaired simplicity of heart with which his mother could take up past relations, and open her meagre life to the high visitations of grace and fashion, without a tinge of self-consciousness or apology. “I shall never be as genuine as that,” he thought, remembering how he had wished to have Mrs. Westmore know that he was of her own class. How mixed our passions are, and how elastic must be the word that would cover any one of them! Amherst’s, at that moment, were all stained with the deep wound to his self-love.

The discolouration he carried in his eye made the mill-village seem more than commonly cheerless and ugly as he walked over to the office after breakfast. Beyond the grim roof-line of the factories a dazzle of rays sent upward from banked white clouds the promise of another brilliant day; and he reflected that Mrs. Westmore would soon be speeding home to the joy of a gallop over the plains.

Far different was the task that awaited him—yet it gave him a pang to think that he might be performing it for the last time. In spite of Mr. Tredegar’s assurances, he was certain that the report of his conduct must by this time have reached the President, and been transmitted to Truscomb; the latter was better that morning, and the next day he would doubtless call his rebellious assistant to account. Amherst, meanwhile, took up his routine with a dull heart. Even should his offense be condoned, his occupation presented, in itself, little future to a man without money or powerful connections. Money! He had spurned the thought of it in choosing his work, yet he now saw that, without its aid, he was powerless to accomplish the object to which his personal desires had been sacrificed. His love of his craft had gradually been merged in the larger love for his fellow-workers, and in the resulting desire to lift and widen their lot. He had once fancied that this end might be attained by an internal revolution in the management of the Westmore mills; that he might succeed in creating an industrial object-lesson conspicuous enough to point the way to wiser law-making and juster relations between the classes. But the last hours’ experiences had shown him how vain it was to assault single-handed the strong barrier between money and labour, and how his own dash at the breach had only thrust him farther back into the obscure ranks of the stragglers. It was, after all, only through politics that he could return successfully to the attack; and financial independence was the needful preliminary to a political career. If he had stuck to the law he might, by this time, have been nearer his goal; but then the gold might not have mattered, since it was only by living among the workers that he had learned to care for their fate. And rather than have forfeited that poignant yet mighty vision of the onward groping of the mass, rather than have missed the widening of his own nature that had come through sharing their hopes and pains, he would still have turned from the easier way, have chosen the deeper initiation rather than the readier attainment.

But this philosophic view of the situation was a mere thread of light on the farthest verge of his sky: much nearer were the clouds of immediate care, amid which his own folly, and his mother’s possible suffering from it, loomed darkest; and these considerations made him resolve that, if his insubordination were overlooked, he would swallow the affront of a pardon, and continue for the present in the mechanical performance of his duties. He had just brought himself to this leaden state of acquiescence when one of the clerks in the outer office thrust his head in to say: “A lady asking for you—” and looking up, Amherst beheld Bessy Westmore.

She came in alone, with an air of high self-possession in marked contrast to her timidity and indecision of the previous day. Amherst thought she looked taller, more majestic; so readily may the upward slant of a soft chin, the firmer line of yielding brows, add a cubit to the outward woman. Her aspect was so commanding that he fancied she had come to express her disapproval of his conduct, to rebuke him for lack of respect to Mr. Tredegar; but a moment later it became clear, even to his inexperienced perceptions, that it was not to himself that her challenge was directed.

She advanced toward the seat he had moved forward, but in her absorption forgot to seat herself, and stood with her clasped hands resting on the back of the chair.

“I have come back to talk to you,” she began, in her sweet voice with its occasional quick lift of appeal. “I knew that, in Mr. Truscomb’s absence, it would be hard for you to leave the mills, and there are one or two things I want you to explain before I go away—some of the things, for instance, that you spoke to Mr. Tredegar about last night.”

Amherst’s feeling of constraint returned. “I’m afraid I expressed myself badly; I may have annoyed him—” he began.

She smiled this away, as though irrelevant to the main issue. “Perhaps you don’t quite understand each other—but I am sure you can make it clear to me.” She sank into the chair, resting one arm on the edge of the desk behind which he had resumed his place. “That is the reason why I came alone,” she continued. “I never can understand when a lot of people are trying to tell me a thing all at once. And I don’t suppose I care as much as a man would—a lawyer especially—about the forms that ought to be observed. All I want is to find out what is wrong and how to remedy it.”

Her blue eyes met Amherst’s in a look that flowed like warmth about his heart. How should he have doubted that her feelings were as exquisite as her means of expressing them? The iron bands of distrust were loosened from his spirit, and he blushed for his cheap scepticism of the morning. In a woman so evidently nurtured in dependence, whose views had been formed, and her actions directed, by the most conventional influences, the mere fact of coming alone to Westmore, in open defiance of her advisers, bespoke a persistence of purpose that put his doubts to shame.

“It will make a great difference to the people here if you interest yourself in them,” he rejoined. “I tried to explain to Mr. Tredegar that I had no wish to criticise the business management of the mills—even if there had been any excuse for my doing so—but that I was sure the condition of the operatives could be very much improved, without permanent harm to the business, by any one who felt a personal sympathy for them; and in the end I believe such sympathy produces better work, and so benefits the employer materially.”

She listened with her gentle look of trust, as though committing to him, with the good faith of a child, her ignorance, her credulity, her little rudimentary convictions and her little tentative aspirations, relying on him not to abuse or misdirect them in the boundless supremacy of his masculine understanding.

“That is just what I want you to explain to me,” she said. “But first I should like to know more about the poor man who was hurt. I meant to see his wife yesterday, but Mr. Gaines told me she would be at work till six, and it would have been difficult to go after that. I did go to the hospital; but the man was sleeping—is Dillon his name?—and the matron told us he was much better. Dr. Disbrow came in the evening and said the same thing—told us it was all a false report about his having been so badly hurt, and that Mr. Truscomb was very much annoyed when he heard of your having said, before the operatives, that Dillon would lose his arm.”

Amherst smiled. “Ah—Mr. Truscomb heard that? Well, he’s right to be annoyed: I ought not to have said it when I did. But unfortunately I am not the only one to be punished. The operative who tied on the black cloth was dismissed this morning.”

Mrs. Westmore flamed up. “Dismissed for that? Oh, how unjust—how cruel!”

“You must look at both sides of the case,” said Amherst, finding it much easier to remain temperate in the glow he had kindled than if he had had to force his own heat into frozen veins. “Of course any act of insubordination must be reprimanded—but I think a reprimand would have been enough.”

It gave him an undeniable throb of pleasure to find that she was not to be checked by such arguments. “But he shall be put back—I won’t have any one discharged for such a reason! You must find him for me at once—you must tell him–-“

Once more Amherst gently restrained her. “If you’ll forgive my saying so, I think it is better to let him go, and take his chance of getting work elsewhere. If he were taken back he might be made to suffer. As things are organized here, the hands are very much at the mercy of the overseers, and the overseer in that room would be likely to make it uncomfortable for a hand who had so openly defied him.”

With a heavy sigh she bent her puzzled brows on him. “How complicated it is! I wonder if I shall ever understand it all. You don’t think Dillon’s accident was his own fault, then?”

“Certainly not; there are too many cards in that room. I pointed out the fact to Mr. Truscomb when the new machines were set up three years ago. An operative may be ever so expert with his fingers, and yet not learn to measure his ordinary movements quite as accurately as if he were an automaton; and that is what a man must do to be safe in the carding-room.”

She sighed again. “The more you tell me, the more difficult it all seems. Why is the carding-room so overcrowded?”

“To make it pay better,” Amherst returned bluntly; and the colour flushed her sensitive skin.

He thought she was about to punish him for his plain-speaking; but she went on after a pause: “What you say is dreadful. Each thing seems to lead back to another—and I feel so ignorant of it all.” She hesitated again, and then said, turning her bluest glance on him: “I am going to be quite frank with you, Mr. Amherst. Mr. Tredegar repeated to me what you said to him last night, and I think he was annoyed that you were unwilling to give any proof of the charges you made.”

“Charges? Ah,” Amherst exclaimed, with a start of recollection, “he means my refusing to say who told me that Dr. Disbrow was not telling the truth about Dillon?”

“Yes. He said that was a very grave accusation to make, and that no one should have made it without being able to give proof.”

“That is quite true, theoretically. But in this case it would be easy for you or Mr. Tredegar to find out whether I was right.”

“But Mr. Tredegar said you refused to say who told you.”

“I was bound to, as it happened. But I am not bound to prevent your trying to get the same information.”

“Ah—” she murmured understandingly; and, a sudden thought striking him, he went on, with a glance at the clock: “If you really wish to judge for yourself, why not go to the hospital now? I shall be free in five minutes, and could go with you if you wish it.”

Amherst had remembered the nurse’s cry of recognition when she saw Mrs. Westmore’s face under the street-lamp; and it immediately occurred to him that, if the two women had really known each other, Mrs. Westmore would have no difficulty in obtaining the information she wanted; while, even if they met as strangers, the dark-eyed girl’s perspicacity might still be trusted to come to their aid. It remained only to be seen how Mrs. Westmore would take his suggestion; but some instinct was already telling him that the highhanded method was the one she really preferred.

“To the hospital—now? I should like it of all things,” she exclaimed, rising with what seemed an almost childish zest in the adventure. “Of course that is the best way of finding out. I ought to have insisted on seeing Dillon yesterday—but I begin to think the matron didn’t want me to.”

Amherst left this inference to work itself out in her mind, contenting himself, as they drove back to Hanaford, with answering her questions about Dillon’s family, the ages of his children, and his wife’s health. Her enquiries, he noticed, did not extend from the particular to the general: her curiosity, as yet, was too purely personal and emotional to lead to any larger consideration of the question. But this larger view might grow out of the investigation of Dillon’s case; and meanwhile Amherst’s own purposes were momentarily lost in the sweet confusion of feeling her near him—of seeing the exquisite grain of her skin, the way her lashes grew out of a dusky line on the edge of the white lids, the way her hair, stealing in spirals of light from brow to ear, wavered off into a fruity down on the edge of the cheek.

At the hospital they were protestingly admitted by Mrs. Ogan, though the official “visitors’ hour” was not till the afternoon; and beside the sufferer’s bed, Amherst saw again that sudden flowering of compassion which seemed the key to his companion’s beauty: as though her lips had been formed for consolation and her hands for tender offices. It was clear enough that Dillon, still sunk in a torpor broken by feverish tossings, was making no perceptible progress toward recovery; and Mrs. Ogan was reduced to murmuring some technical explanation about the state of the wound while Bessy hung above him with reassuring murmurs as to his wife’s fate, and promises that the children should be cared for.

Amherst had noticed, on entering, that a new nurse—a gaping young woman instantly lost in the study of Mrs. Westmore’s toilet—had replaced the dark-eyed attendant of the day before; and supposing that the latter was temporarily off duty, he asked Mrs. Ogan if she might be seen.

The matron’s face was a picture of genteel perplexity. “The other nurse? Our regular surgical nurse, Miss Golden, is ill—Miss Hibbs, here, is replacing her for the present.” She indicated the gaping damsel; then, as Amherst persisted: “Ah,” she wondered negligently, “do you mean the young lady you saw here yesterday? Certainly—I had forgotten: Miss Brent was merely a—er—temporary substitute. I believe she was recommended to Dr. Disbrow by one of his patients; but we found her quite unsuitable—in fact, unfitted—and the doctor discharged her this morning.”

Mrs. Westmore had drawn near, and while the matron delivered her explanation, with an uneasy sorting and shifting of words, a quick signal of intelligence passed between her hearers. “You see?” Amherst’s eyes exclaimed; “I see—they have sent her away because she told you,” Bessy’s flashed back in wrath, and his answering look did not deny her inference.

“Do you know where she has gone?” Amherst enquired; but Mrs. Ogan, permitting her brows a faint lift of surprise, replied that she had no idea of Miss Brent’s movements, beyond having heard that she was to leave Hanaford immediately

In the carriage Bessy exclaimed: “It was the nurse, of course—if we could only find her! Brent—did Mrs. Ogan say her name was Brent?”

“Do you know the name?”

“Yes—at least—but it couldn’t, of course, be the girl I knew–-“

“Miss Brent saw you the night you arrived, and thought she recognized you. She said you and she had been at some school or convent together.”

“The Sacred Heart? Then it is Justine Brent! I heard they had lost their money—I haven’t seen her for years. But how strange that she should be a hospital nurse! And why is she at Hanaford, I wonder?”

“She was here only on a visit; she didn’t tell me where she lived. She said she heard that a surgical nurse was wanted at the hospital, and volunteered her services; I’m afraid she got small thanks for them.”

“Do you really think they sent her away for talking to you? How do you suppose they found out?”

“I waited for her last night when she left the hospital, and I suppose Mrs. Ogan or one of the doctors saw us. It was thoughtless of me,” Amherst exclaimed with compunction.

“I wish I had seen her—poor Justine! We were the greatest friends at the convent. She was the ringleader in all our mischief—I never saw any one so quick and clever. I suppose her fun is all gone now.”

For a moment Mrs. Westmore’s mind continued to linger among her memories; then she reverted to the question of the Dillons, and of what might best be done for them if Miss Brent’s fears should be realized.

As the carriage neared her door she turned to her companion with extended hand. “Thank you so much, Mr. Amherst. I am glad you suggested that Mr. Truscomb should find some work for Dillon about the office. But I must talk to you about this again—can you come in this evening?” VII

AMHERST could never afterward regain a detailed impression of the weeks that followed. They lived in his memory chiefly as exponents of the unforeseen, nothing he had looked for having come to pass in the way or at the time expected; while the whole movement of life was like the noonday flow of a river, in which the separate ripples of brightness are all merged in one blinding glitter. His recurring conferences with Mrs. Westmore formed, as it were, the small surprising kernel of fact about which sensations gathered and grew with the swift ripening of a magician’s fruit. That she should remain on at Hanaford to look into the condition of the mills did not, in itself, seem surprising to Amherst; for his short phase of doubt had been succeeded by an abundant inflow of faith in her intentions. It satisfied his inner craving for harmony that her face and spirit should, after all, so corroborate and complete each other; that it needed no moral sophistry to adjust her acts to her appearance, her words to the promise of her smile. But her immediate confidence in him, her resolve to support him in his avowed insubordination, to ignore, with the royal license of her sex, all that was irregular and inexpedient in asking his guidance while the whole official strength of the company darkened the background with a gathering storm of disapproval—this sense of being the glove flung by her hand in the face of convention, quickened astonishingly the flow of Amherst’s sensations. It was as though a mountain-climber, braced to the strain of a hard ascent, should suddenly see the way break into roses, and level itself in a path for his feet.

On his second visit he found the two ladies together, and Mrs. Ansell’s smile of approval seemed to cast a social sanction on the episode, to classify it as comfortably usual and unimportant. He could see that her friend’s manner put Bessy at ease, helping her to ask her own questions, and to reflect on his suggestions, with less bewilderment and more self-confidence. Mrs. Ansell had the faculty of restoring to her the belief in her reasoning powers that her father could dissolve in a monosyllable.

The talk, on this occasion, had turned mainly on the future of the Dillon family, on the best means of compensating for the accident, and, incidentally, on the care of the young children of the mill-colony. Though Amherst did not believe in the extremer forms of industrial paternalism, he was yet of opinion that, where married women were employed, the employer should care for their children. He had been gradually, and somewhat reluctantly, brought to this conviction by the many instances of unavoidable neglect and suffering among the children of the women-workers at Westmore; and Mrs. Westmore took up the scheme with all the ardour of her young motherliness, quivering at the thought of hungry or ailing children while her Cicely, leaning a silken head against her, lifted puzzled eyes to her face.

On the larger problems of the case it was less easy to fix Bessy’s attention; but Amherst was far from being one of the extreme theorists who reject temporary remedies lest they defer the day of general renewal, and since he looked on every gain in the material condition of the mill-hands as a step in their moral growth, he was quite willing to hold back his fundamental plans while he discussed the establishment of a nursery, and of a night-school for the boys in the mills.

The third time he called, he found Mr. Langhope and Mr. Halford Gaines of the company. The President of the Westmore mills was a trim middle-sized man, whose high pink varnish of good living would have turned to purple could he have known Mr. Langhope’s opinion of his jewelled shirt-front and the padded shoulders of his evening-coat. Happily he had no inkling of these views, and was fortified in his command of the situation by an unimpaired confidence in his own appearance; while Mr. Langhope, discreetly withdrawn behind a veil of cigar-smoke, let his silence play like a fine criticism over the various phases of the discussion.

It was a surprise to Amherst to find himself in Mr. Gaines’s presence. The President, secluded in his high office, seldom visited the mills, and when there showed no consciousness of any presence lower than Truscomb’s; and Amherst’s first thought was that, in the manager’s enforced absence, he was to be called to account by the head of the firm. But he was affably welcomed by Mr. Gaines, who made it clear that his ostensible purpose in coming was to hear Amherst’s views as to the proposed night-schools and nursery. These were pointedly alluded to as Mrs. Westmore’s projects, and the young man was made to feel that he was merely called in as a temporary adviser in Truscomb’s absence. This was, in fact, the position Amherst preferred to take, and he scrupulously restricted himself to the answering of questions, letting Mrs. Westmore unfold his plans as though they had been her own. “It is much better,” he reflected, “that they should all think so, and she too, for Truscomb will be on his legs again in a day or two, and then my hours will be numbered.”

Meanwhile he was surprised to find Mr. Gaines oddly amenable to the proposed innovations, which he appeared to regard as new fashions in mill-management, to be adopted for the same cogent reasons as a new cut in coat-tails.

“Of course we want to be up-to-date—there’s no reason why the Westmore mills shouldn’t do as well by their people as any mills in the country,” he affirmed, in the tone of the entertainer accustomed to say: “I want the thing done handsomely.” But he seemed even less conscious than Mrs. Westmore that each particular wrong could be traced back to a radical vice in the system. He appeared to think that every murmur of assent to her proposals passed the sponge, once for all, over the difficulty propounded: as though a problem in algebra should be solved by wiping it off the blackboard.

“My dear Bessy, we all owe you a debt of gratitude for coming here, and bringing, so to speak, a fresh eye to bear on the subject. If I’ve been, perhaps, a little too exclusively absorbed in making the mills profitable, my friend Langhope will, I believe, not be the first to—er—cast a stone at me.” Mr. Gaines, who was the soul of delicacy, stumbled a little over the awkward associations connected with this figure, but, picking himself up, hastened on to affirm: “And in that respect, I think we can challenge comparison with any industry in the state; but I am the first to admit that there may be another side, a side that it takes a woman—a mother—to see. For instance,” he threw in jocosely, “I flatter myself that I know how to order a good dinner; but I always leave the flowers to my wife. And if you’ll permit me to say so,” he went on, encouraged by the felicity of his image, “I believe it will produce a most pleasing effect—not only on the operatives themselves, but on the whole of Hanaford—on our own set of people especially—to have you come here and interest yourself in the—er—philanthropic side of the work.”

Bessy coloured a little. She blushed easily, and was perhaps not over-discriminating as to the quality of praise received; but under her ripple of pleasure a stronger feeling stirred, and she said hastily: “I am afraid I never should have thought of these things if Mr. Amherst had not pointed them out to me.”

Mr. Gaines met this blandly. “Very gratifying to Mr. Amherst to have you put it in that way; and I am sure we all appreciate his valuable hints. Truscomb himself could not have been more helpful, though his larger experience will no doubt be useful later on, in developing and—er—modifying your plans.”

It was difficult to reconcile this large view of the moral issue with the existence of abuses which made the management of the Westmore mills as unpleasantly notorious in one section of the community as it was agreeably notable in another. But Amherst was impartial enough to see that Mr. Gaines was unconscious of the incongruities of the situation. He left the reconciling of incompatibles to Truscomb with the simple faith of the believer committing a like task to his maker: it was in the manager’s mind that the dark processes of adjustment took place. Mr. Gaines cultivated the convenient and popular idea that by ignoring wrongs one is not so much condoning as actually denying their existence; and in pursuance of this belief he devoutly abstained from studying the conditions at Westmore.

A farther surprise awaited Amherst when Truscomb reappeared in the office. The manager was always a man of few words; and for the first days his intercourse with his assistant was restricted to asking questions and issuing orders. Soon afterward, it became known that Dillon’s arm was to be amputated, and that afternoon Truscomb was summoned to see Mrs. Westmore. When he returned he sent for Amherst; and the young man felt sure that his hour had come.

He was at dinner when the message reached him, and he knew from the tightening of his mother’s lips that she too interpreted it in the same way. He was glad that Duplain’s presence kept her from speaking her fears; and he thanked her inwardly for the smile with which she watched him go.

That evening, when he returned, the smile was still at its post; but it dropped away wearily as he said, with his hands on her shoulders: “Don’t worry, mother; I don’t know exactly what’s happening, but we’re not blacklisted yet.”

Mrs. Amherst had immediately taken up her work, letting her nervous tension find its usual escape through her finger-tips. Her needles flagged as she lifted her eyes to his.

“Something is happening, then?” she murmured.

“Oh, a number of things, evidently—but though I’m in the heart of them, I can’t yet make out how they are going to affect me.”

His mother’s glance twinkled in time with the flash of her needles. “There’s always a safe place in the heart of a storm,” she said shrewdly; and Amherst rejoined with a laugh: “Well, if it’s Truscomb’s heart, I don’t know that it’s particularly safe for me.”

“Tell me just what he said, John,” she begged, making no attempt to carry the pleasantry farther, though its possibilities still seemed to flicker about her lip; and Amherst proceeded to recount his talk with the manager.

Truscomb, it appeared, had made no allusion to Dillon; his avowed purpose in summoning his assistant had been to discuss with the latter the question of the proposed nursery and schools. Mrs. Westmore, at Amherst’s suggestion, had presented these projects as her own; but the question of a site having come up, she had mentioned to Truscomb his assistant’s proposal that the company should buy for the purpose the notorious Eldorado. The road-house in question had always been one of the most destructive influences in the mill-colony, and Amherst had made one or two indirect attempts to have the building converted to other uses; but the persistent opposition he encountered gave colour to the popular report that the manager took a high toll from the landlord.

It therefore at once occurred to Amherst to suggest the purchase of the property to Mrs. Westmore; and he was not surprised to find that Truscomb’s opposition to the scheme centred in the choice of the building. But even at this point the manager betrayed no open resistance; he seemed tacitly to admit Amherst’s right to discuss the proposed plans, and even to be consulted concerning the choice of a site. He was ready with a dozen good reasons against the purchase of the road-house; but here also he proceeded with a discretion unexampled in his dealings with his subordinates. He acknowledged the harm done by the dance-hall, but objected that he could not conscientiously advise the company to pay the extortionate price at which it was held, and reminded Amherst that, if that particular source of offense were removed, others would inevitably spring up to replace it; marshalling the usual temporizing arguments of tolerance and expediency, with no marked change from his usual tone, till, just as the interview was ending, he asked, with a sudden drop to conciliation, if the assistant manager had anything to complain of in the treatment he received.

This came as such a surprise to Amherst that before he had collected himself he found Truscomb ambiguously but unmistakably offering him—with the practised indirection of the man accustomed to cover his share in such transactions—a substantial “consideration” for dropping the matter of the road-house. It was incredible, yet it had really happened: the all-powerful Truscomb, who held Westmore in the hollow of his hand, had stooped to bribing his assistant because he was afraid to deal with him in a more summary manner. Amherst’s leap of anger at the offer was curbed by the instant perception of its cause. He had no time to search for a reason; he could only rally himself to meet the unintelligible with a composure as abysmal as Truscomb’s; and his voice still rang with the wonder of the incident as he retailed it to his mother.

“Think of what it means, mother, for a young woman like Mrs. Westmore, without any experience or any habit of authority, to come here, and at the first glimpse of injustice, to be so revolted that she finds the courage and cleverness to put her little hand to the machine and reverse the engines—for it’s nothing less that she’s done! Oh, I know there’ll be a reaction—the pendulum’s sure to swing back: but you’ll see it won’t swing as far. Of course I shall go in the end—but Truscomb may go too: Jove, if I could pull him down on me, like what’s-his-name and the pillars of the temple!”

He had risen and was measuring the little sitting-room with his long strides, his head flung back and his eyes dark with the inward look his mother had not always cared to see there. But now her own glance seemed to have caught a ray from his, and the knitting flowed from her hands like the thread of fate, as she sat silent, letting him exhale his hopes and his wonder, and murmuring only, when he dropped again to the chair at her side: “You won’t go, Johnny—you won’t go.”

Mrs. Westmore lingered on for over two weeks, and during that time Amherst was able, in various directions, to develop her interest in the mill-workers. His own schemes involved a complete readjustment of the relation between the company and the hands: the suppression of the obsolete company “store” and tenements, which had so long sapped the thrift and ambition of the workers; the transformation of the Hopewood grounds into a park and athletic field, and the division of its remaining acres into building lots for the mill-hands; the establishing of a library, a dispensary and emergency hospital, and various other centres of humanizing influence; but he refrained from letting her see that his present suggestion was only a part of this larger plan, lest her growing sympathy should be checked. He had in his mother an example of the mind accessible only to concrete impressions: the mind which could die for the particular instance, yet remain serenely indifferent to its causes. To Mrs. Amherst, her son’s work had been interesting simply because it was his work: remove his presence from Westmore, and the whole industrial problem became to her as non-existent as star-dust to the naked eye. And in Bessy Westmore he divined a nature of the same quality—divined, but no longer criticized it. Was not that concentration on the personal issue just the compensating grace of her sex? Did it not offer a warm tint of human inconsistency to eyes chilled by contemplating life in the mass? It pleased Amherst for the moment to class himself with the impersonal student of social problems, though in truth his interest in them had its source in an imagination as open as Bessy’s to the pathos of the personal appeal. But if he had the same sensitiveness, how inferior were his means of expressing it! Again and again, during their talks, he had the feeling which had come to him when she bent over Dillon’s bed—that her exquisite lines were, in some mystical sense, the visible flowering of her nature, that they had taken shape in response to the inward motions of the heart.

To a young man ruled by high enthusiasms there can be no more dazzling adventure than to work this miracle in the tender creature who yields her mind to his—to see, as it were, the blossoming of the spiritual seed in forms of heightened loveliness, the bluer beam of the eye, the richer curve of the lip, all the physical currents of life quickening under the breath of a kindled thought. It did not occur to him that any other emotion had effected the change he perceived. Bessy Westmore had in full measure that gift of unconscious hypocrisy which enables a woman to make the man in whom she is interested believe that she enters into all his thoughts. She had—more than this—the gift of self-deception, supreme happiness of the unreflecting nature, whereby she was able to believe herself solely engrossed in the subjects they discussed, to regard him as the mere spokesman of important ideas, thus saving their intercourse from present constraint, and from the awkward contemplation of future contingencies. So, in obedience to the ancient sorcery of life, these two groped for and found each other in regions seemingly so remote from the accredited domain of romance that it would have been as a great surprise to them to learn whither they had strayed as to see the arid streets of Westmore suddenly bursting into leaf.

With Mrs. Westmore’s departure Amherst, for the first time, became aware of a certain flatness in his life. His daily task seemed dull and purposeless, and he was galled by Truscomb’s studied forbearance, under which he suspected a quickly accumulating store of animosity. He almost longed for some collision which would release the manager’s pent-up resentment; yet he dreaded increasingly any accident that might make his stay at Westmore impossible.

It was on Sundays, when he was freed from his weekly task, that he was most at the mercy of these opposing feelings. They drove him forth on long solitary walks beyond the town, walks ending most often in the deserted grounds of Hopewood, beautiful now in the ruined gold of October. As he sat under the beech-limbs above the river, watching its brown current sweep the willow-roots of the banks, he thought how this same current, within its next short reach, passed from wooded seclusion to the noise and pollution of the mills. So his own life seemed to have passed once more from the tranced flow of the last weeks into its old channel of unillumined labour. But other thoughts came to him too: the vision of converting that melancholy pleasure-ground into an outlet for the cramped lives of the mill-workers; and he pictured the weed-grown lawns and paths thronged with holiday-makers, and the slopes nearer the factories dotted with houses and gardens.

An unexpected event revived these hopes. A few days before Christmas it became known to Hanaford that Mrs. Westmore would return for the holidays. Cicely was drooping in town air, and Bessy had persuaded Mr. Langhope that the bracing cold of Hanaford would be better for the child than the milder atmosphere of Long Island. They reappeared, and brought with them a breath of holiday cheerfulness such as Westmore had never known. It had always been the rule at the mills to let the operatives take their pleasure as they saw fit, and the Eldorado and the Hanaford saloons throve on this policy. But Mrs. Westmore arrived full of festal projects. There was to be a giant Christmas tree for the mill-children, a supper on the same scale for the operatives, and a bout of skating and coasting at Hopewood for the older lads—the “band” and “bobbin” boys in whom Amherst had always felt a special interest. The Gaines ladies, resolved to show themselves at home in the latest philanthropic fashions, actively seconded Bessy’s endeavours, and for a week Westmore basked under a sudden heat-wave of beneficence.

The time had passed when Amherst might have made light of such efforts. With Bessy Westmore smiling up, holly-laden, from the foot of the ladder on which she kept him perched, how could he question the efficacy of hanging the opening-room with Christmas wreaths, or the ultimate benefit of gorging the operatives with turkey and sheathing their offspring in red mittens? It was just like the end of a story-book with a pretty moral, and Amherst was in the mood to be as much taken by the tinsel as the youngest mill-baby held up to gape at the tree.

At the New Year, when Mrs. Westmore left, the negotiations for the purchase of the Eldorado were well advanced, and it was understood that on their completion she was to return for the opening of the night-school and nursery. Suddenly, however, it became known that the proprietor of the road-house had decided not to sell. Amherst heard of the decision from Duplain, and at once foresaw the inevitable result—that Mrs. Westmore’s plan would be given up owing to the difficulty of finding another site. Mr. Gaines and Truscomb had both discountenanced the erection of a special building for what was, after all, only a tentative enterprise. Among the purchasable houses in Westmore no other was suited to the purpose, and they had, therefore, a good excuse for advising Bessy to defer her experiment.

Almost at the same time, however, another piece of news changed the aspect of affairs. A scandalous occurrence at the Eldorado, witnesses to which were unexpectedly forthcoming, put it in Amherst’s power to threaten the landlord with exposure unless he should at once accept the company’s offer and withdraw from Westmore. Amherst had no long time to consider the best means of putting this threat into effect. He knew it was not only idle to appeal to Truscomb, but essential to keep the facts from him till the deed was done; yet how obtain the authority to act without him? The seemingly insuperable difficulties of the situation whetted Amherst’s craving for a struggle. He thought first of writing to Mrs. Westmore;, but now that the spell of her presence was withdrawn he felt how hard it would be to make her understand the need of prompt and secret action; and besides, was it likely that, at such short notice, she could command the needful funds? Prudence opposed the attempt, and on reflection he decided to appeal to Mr. Gaines, hoping that the flagrancy of the case would rouse the President from his usual attitude of indifference.

Mr. Gaines was roused to the extent of showing a profound resentment against the cause of his disturbance. He relieved his sense of responsibility by some didactic remarks on the vicious tendencies of the working-classes, and concluded with the reflection that the more you did for them the less thanks you got. But when Amherst showed an unwillingness to let the matter rest on this time-honoured aphorism, the President retrenched himself behind ambiguities, suggestions that they should await Mrs. Westmore’s return, and general considerations of a pessimistic nature, tapering off into a gloomy view of the weather.

“By God, I’ll write to her!” Amherst exclaimed, as the Gaines portals closed on him; and all the way back to Westmore he was busy marshalling his arguments and entreaties.

He wrote the letter that night, but did not post it. Some unavowed distrust of her restrained him—a distrust not of her heart but of her intelligence. He felt that the whole future of Westmore was at stake, and decided to await the development of the next twenty-four hours. The letter was still in his pocket when, after dinner, he was summoned to the office by Truscomb.

That evening, when he returned home, he entered the little sitting-room without speaking. His mother sat there alone, in her usual place—how many nights he had seen the lamplight slant at that particular angle across her fresh cheek and the fine wrinkles about her eyes! He was going to add another wrinkle to the number now—soon they would creep down and encroach upon the smoothness of the cheek.

She looked up and saw that his glance was turned to the crowded bookshelves behind her.

“There must be nearly a thousand of them,” he said as their eyes met.

“Books? Yes—with your father’s. Why—were you thinking…?” She started up suddenly and crossed over to him.

“Too many for wanderers,” he continued, drawing her hands to his breast; then, as she clung to him, weeping and trembling a little: “It had to be, mother,” he said, kissing her penitently where the fine wrinkles died into the cheek.

VIII

AMHERST’S dismissal was not to take effect for a month; and in the interval he addressed himself steadily to his task.

He went through the routine of the work numbly; but his intercourse with the hands tugged at deep fibres of feelings. He had always shared, as far as his duties allowed, in the cares and interests of their few free hours: the hours when the automatic appendages of the giant machine became men and women again, with desires and passions of their own. Under Amherst’s influence the mixed elements of the mill-community had begun to crystallize into social groups: his books had served as an improvised lending-library, he had organized a club, a rudimentary orchestra, and various other means of binding together the better spirits of the community. With the older men, the attractions of the Eldorado, and kindred inducements, often worked against him; but among the younger hands, and especially the boys, he had gained a personal ascendency that it was bitter to relinquish.

It was the severing of this tie that cost him most pain in the final days at Westmore; and after he had done what he could to console his mother, and to put himself in the way of getting work elsewhere, he tried to see what might be saved out of the ruins of the little polity he had built up. He hoped his influence might at least persist in the form of an awakened instinct of fellowship; and he gave every spare hour to strengthening the links he had tried to form. The boys, at any rate, would be honestly sorry to have him go: not, indeed, from the profounder reasons that affected him, but because he had not only stood persistently between the overseers and themselves, but had recognized their right to fun after work-hours as well as their right to protection while they worked.

In the glow of Mrs. Westmore’s Christmas visitation an athletic club had been formed, and leave obtained to use the Hopewood grounds for Saturday afternoon sports; and thither Amherst continued to conduct the boys after the mills closed at the week-end. His last Saturday had now come: a shining afternoon of late February, with a red sunset bending above frozen river and slopes of unruffled snow. For an hour or more he had led the usual sports, coasting down the steep descent from the house to the edge of the woods, and skating and playing hockey on the rough river-ice which eager hands kept clear after every snow-storm. He always felt the contagion of these sports: the glow of movement, the tumult of young voices, the sting of the winter air, roused all the boyhood in his blood. But today he had to force himself through his part in the performance. To the very last, as he now saw, he had hoped for a sign in the heavens: not the reversal of his own sentence—for, merely on disciplinary grounds, he perceived that to be impossible—but something pointing to a change in the management of the mills, some proof that Mrs. Westmore’s intervention had betokened more than a passing impulse of compassion. Surely she would not accept without question the abandonment of her favourite scheme; and if she came back to put the question, the answer would lay bare the whole situation…. So Amherst’s hopes had persuaded him; but the day before he had heard that she was to sail for Europe. The report, first announced in the papers, had been confirmed by his mother, who brought back from a visit to Hanaford the news that Mrs. Westmore was leaving at once for an indefinite period, and that the Hanaford house was to be closed. Irony would have been the readiest caustic for the wound inflicted; but Amherst, for that very reason, disdained it. He would not taint his disappointment with mockery, but would leave it among the unspoiled sadnesses of life….

He flung himself into the boys’ sports with his usual energy, meaning that their last Saturday with him should be their merriest; but he went through his part mechanically, and was glad when the sun began to dip toward the rim of the woods.

He was standing on the ice, where the river widened just below the house, when a jingle of bells broke on the still air, and he saw a sleigh driven rapidly up the avenue. Amherst watched it in surprise. Who, at that hour, could be invading the winter solitude of Hopewood? The sleigh halted near the closed house, and a muffled figure, alighting alone, began to move down the snowy slope toward the skaters.

In an instant he had torn off his skates and was bounding up the bank. He would have known the figure anywhere—known that lovely poise of the head, the mixture of hesitancy and quickness in the light tread which even the snow could not impede. Half-way up the slope to the house they met, and Mrs. Westmore held out her hand. Face and lips, as she stood above him, glowed with her swift passage through the evening air, and in the blaze of the sunset she seemed saturated with heavenly fires.

“I drove out to find you—they told me you were here—I arrived this morning, quite suddenly….”

She broke off, as though the encounter had checked her ardour instead of kindling it; but he drew no discouragement from her tone.

“I hoped you would come before I left—I knew you would!” he exclaimed; and at his last words her face clouded anxiously.

“I didn’t know you were leaving Westmore till yesterday—the day before—I got a letter….” Again she wavered, perceptibly trusting her difficulty to him, in the sweet way he had been trying to forget; and he answered with recovered energy: “The great thing is that you should be here.”

She shook her head at his optimism. “What can I do if you go?”

“You can give me a chance, before I go, to tell you a little about some of the loose ends I am leaving.”

“But why are you leaving them? I don’t understand. Is it inevitable?”

“Inevitable,” he returned, with an odd glow of satisfaction in the word; and as her eyes besought him, he added, smiling: “I’ve been dismissed, you see; and from the manager’s standpoint I think I deserved it. But the best part of my work needn’t go with me—and that is what I should like to speak to you about. As assistant manager I can easily be replaced—have been, I understand, already; but among these boys here I should like to think that a little of me stayed—and it will, if you’ll let me tell you what I’ve been doing.”

[Illustration: Half-way up the slope to the house they met.]

She glanced away from him at the busy throng on the ice and at the other black cluster above the coasting-slide.

“How they’re enjoying it!” she murmured. “What a pity it was never done before! And who will keep it up when you’re gone?”

“You,” he answered, meeting her eyes again; and as she coloured a little under his look he went on quickly: “Will you come over and look at the coasting? The time is almost up. One more slide and they’ll be packing off to supper.”

She nodded “yes,” and they walked in silence over the white lawn, criss-crossed with tramplings of happy feet, to the ridge from which the coasters started on their run. Amherst’s object in turning the talk had been to gain a moment’s respite. He could not bear to waste his perfect hour in futile explanations: he wanted to keep it undisturbed by any thought of the future. And the same feeling seemed to possess his companion, for she did not speak again till they reached the knoll where the boys were gathered.

A sled packed with them hung on the brink: with a last shout it was off, dipping down the incline with the long curved flight of a swallow, flashing across the wide meadow at the base of the hill, and tossed upward again by its own impetus, till it vanished in the dark rim of wood on the opposite height. The lads waiting on the knoll sang out for joy, and Bessy clapped her hands and joined with them.

“What fun! I wish I’d brought Cicely! I’ve not coasted for years,” she laughed out, as the second detachment of boys heaped themselves on another sled and shot down. Amherst looked at her with a smile. He saw that every other feeling had vanished in the exhilaration of watching the flight of the sleds. She had forgotten why she had come—forgotten her distress at his dismissal—forgotten everything but the spell of the long white slope, and the tingle of cold in her veins.

“Shall we go down? Should you like it?” he asked, feeling no resentment under the heightened glow of his pulses.

“Oh, do take me—I shall love it!” Her eyes shone like a child’s—she might have been a lovelier embodiment of the shouting boyhood about them.

The first band of coasters, sled at heels, had by this time already covered a third of the homeward stretch; but Amherst was too impatient to wait. Plunging down to the meadow he caught up the sled-rope, and raced back with the pack of rejoicing youth in his wake. The sharp climb up the hill seemed to fill his lungs with flame: his whole body burned with a strange intensity of life. As he reached the top, a distant bell rang across the fields from Westmore, and the boys began to snatch up their coats and mufflers.

“Be off with you—I’ll look after the sleds,” Amherst called to them as they dispersed; then he turned for a moment to see that the skaters below were also heeding the summons.

A cold pallor lay on the river-banks and on the low meadow beneath the knoll; but the woodland opposite stood black against scarlet vapours that ravelled off in sheer light toward a sky hung with an icy moon.

Amherst drew up the sled and held it steady while Bessy, seating herself, tucked her furs close with little breaks of laughter; then he placed himself in front.

“Ready?” he cried over his shoulder, and “Ready!” she called back.

Their craft quivered under them, hanging an instant over the long stretch of whiteness below; the level sun dazzled their eyes, and the first plunge seemed to dash them down into darkness. Amherst heard a cry of glee behind him; then all sounds were lost in the whistle of air humming by like the flight of a million arrows. They had dropped below the sunset and were tearing through the clear nether twilight of the descent; then, with a bound, the sled met the level, and shot away across the meadow toward the opposite height. It seemed to Amherst as though his body had been left behind, and only the spirit in him rode the wild blue currents of galloping air; but as the sled’s rush began to slacken with the strain of the last ascent he was recalled to himself by the touch of the breathing warmth at his back. Bessy had put out a hand to steady herself, and as she leaned forward, gripping his arm, a flying end of her furs swept his face. There was a delicious pang in being thus caught back to life; and as the sled stopped, and he sprang to his feet, he still glowed with the sensation. Bessy too was under the spell. In the dusk of the beech-grove where they had landed, he could barely distinguish her features; but her eyes shone on him, and he heard her quick breathing as he stooped to help her to her feet.

“Oh, how beautiful—it’s the only thing better than a good gallop!”

She leaned against a tree-bole, panting a little, and loosening her furs.

“What a pity it’s too dark to begin again!” she sighed, looking about her through the dim weaving of leafless boughs.

“It’s not so dark in the open—we might have one more,” he proposed; but she shook her head, seized by a new whim.

“It’s so still and delicious in here—did you hear the snow fall when that squirrel jumped across to the pine?” She tilted her head, narrowing her lids as she peered upward. “There he is! One gets used to the light…. Look! See his little eyes shining down at us!”

As Amherst looked where she pointed, the squirrel leapt to another tree, and they stole on after him through the hushed wood, guided by his grey flashes in the dimness. Here and there, in a break of the snow, they trod on a bed of wet leaves that gave out a breath of hidden life, or a hemlock twig dashed its spicy scent into their faces. As they grew used to the twilight their eyes began to distinguish countless delicate gradations of tint: cold mottlings of grey-black boles against the snow, wet russets of drifted beech-leaves, a distant network of mauve twigs melting into the woodland haze. And in the silence just such fine gradations of sound became audible: the soft drop of loosened snow-lumps, a stir of startled wings, the creak of a dead branch, somewhere far off in darkness.

They walked on, still in silence, as though they had entered the glade of an enchanted forest and were powerless to turn back or to break the hush with a word. They made no pretense of following the squirrel any longer; he had flashed away to a high tree-top, from which his ironical chatter pattered down on their unheeding ears. Amherst’s sensations were not of that highest order of happiness where mind and heart mingle their elements in the strong draught of life: it was a languid fume that stole through him from the cup at his lips. But after the sense of defeat and failure which the last weeks had brought, the reaction was too exquisite to be analyzed. All he asked of the moment was its immediate sweetness….

They had reached the brink of a rocky glen where a little brook still sent its thread of sound through mufflings of ice and huddled branches. Bessy stood still a moment, bending her head to the sweet cold tinkle; then she moved away and said slowly: “We must go back.”

As they turned to retrace their steps a yellow line of light through the tree-trunks showed them that they had not, after all, gone very deep into the wood. A few minutes’ walk would restore them to the lingering daylight, and on the farther side of the meadow stood the sleigh which was to carry Bessy back to Hanaford. A sudden sense of the evanescence of the moment roused Amherst from his absorption. Before the next change in the fading light he would be back again among the ugly realities of life. Did she, too, hate to return to them? Or why else did she walk so slowly—why did she seem as much afraid as himself to break the silence that held them in its magic circle?

A dead pine-branch caught in the edge of her skirt, and she stood still while Amherst bent down to release her. As she turned to help him he looked up with a smile.

“The wood doesn’t want to let you go,” he said.

She made no reply, and he added, rising: “But you’ll come back to it—you’ll come back often, I hope.”

He could not see her face in the dimness, but her voice trembled a little as she answered: “I will do what you tell me—but I shall be alone—against all the others: they don’t understand.”

The simplicity, the helplessness, of the avowal, appealed to him not as a weakness but as a grace. He understood what she was really saying: “How can you desert me? How can you put this great responsibility on me, and then leave me to bear it alone?” and in the light of her unuttered appeal his action seemed almost like cruelty. Why had he opened her eyes to wrongs she had no strength to redress without his aid?

He could only answer, as he walked beside her toward the edge of the wood: “You will not be alone—in time you will make the others understand; in time they will be with you.”

“Ah, you don’t believe that!” she exclaimed, pausing suddenly, and speaking with an intensity of reproach that amazed him.

“I hope it, at any rate,” he rejoined, pausing also. “And I’m sure that if you will come here oftener—if you’ll really live among your people–-“

“How can you say that, when you’re deserting them?” she broke in, with a feminine excess of inconsequence that fairly dashed the words from his lips.

“Deserting them? Don’t you understand–-?”

“I understand that you’ve made Mr. Gaines and Truscomb angry—yes; but if I should insist on your staying–-“

Amherst felt the blood rush to his forehead. “No—no, it’s not possible!” he exclaimed, with a vehemence addressed more to himself than to her.

“Then what will happen at the mills?”

“Oh, some one else will be found—the new ideas are stirring everywhere. And if you’ll only come back here, and help my successor–-“

“Do you think they are likely to choose any one else with your ideas?” she interposed with unexpected acuteness; and after a short silence he answered: “Not immediately, perhaps; but in time—in time there will be improvements.”

“As if the poor people could wait! Oh, it’s cruel, cruel of you to go!”

Her voice broke in a throb of entreaty that went to his inmost fibres.

“You don’t understand. It’s impossible in the present state of things that I should do any good by staying.”

“Then you refuse? Even if I were to insist on their asking you to stay, you would still refuse?” she persisted.

“Yes—I should still refuse.”

She made no answer, but moved a few steps nearer to the edge of the wood. The meadow was just below them now, and the sleigh in plain sight on the height beyond. Their steps made no sound on the sodden drifts underfoot, and in the silence he thought he heard a catch in her breathing. It was enough to make the brimming moment overflow. He stood still before her and bent his head to hers.

“Bessy!” he said, with sudden vehemence.

She did not speak or move, but in the quickened state of his perceptions he became aware that she was silently weeping. The gathering darkness under the trees enveloped them. It absorbed her outline into the shadowy background of the wood, from which her face emerged in a faint spot of pallor; and the same obscurity seemed to envelop his faculties, merging the hard facts of life in a blur of feeling in which the distinctest impression was the sweet sense of her tears.

“Bessy!” he exclaimed again; and as he drew a step nearer he felt her yield to him, and bury her sobs against his arm.

BOOK II

IX

“BUT, Justine–-“

Mrs. Harry Dressel, seated in the June freshness of her Oak Street drawing-room, and harmonizing by her high lights and hard edges with the white-and-gold angularities of the best furniture, cast a rebuking eye on her friend Miss Brent, who stood arranging in a glass bowl the handful of roses she had just brought in from the garden.

Mrs. Dressel’s intonation made it clear that the entrance of Miss Brent had been the signal for renewing an argument which the latter had perhaps left the room to escape.

“When you were here three years ago, Justine, I could understand your not wanting to go out, because you were in mourning for your mother—and besides, you’d volunteered for that bad surgical case in the Hope Hospital. But now that you’ve come back for a rest and a change I can’t imagine why you persist in shutting yourself up—unless, of course,” she concluded, in a higher key of reproach, “it’s because you think so little of Hanaford society–-“

Justine Brent, putting the last rose in place, turned from her task with a protesting gesture.

“My dear Effie, who am I to think little of any society, when I belong to none?” She passed a last light touch over the flowers, and crossing the room, brushed her friend’s hand with the same caressing gesture.

Mrs. Dressel met it with an unrelenting turn of her plump shoulder, murmuring: “Oh, if you take that tone!” And on Miss Brent’s gaily rejoining: “Isn’t it better than to have other people take it for me?” she replied, with an air of affront that expressed itself in a ruffling of her whole pretty person: “If you’ll excuse my saying so, Justine, the fact that you are staying with me would be enough to make you welcome anywhere in Hanaford!”

“I’m sure of it, dear; so sure that my horrid pride rather resents being floated in on the high tide of such overwhelming credentials.”

Mrs. Dressel glanced up doubtfully at the dark face laughing down on her. Though she was president of the Maplewood Avenue Book-club, and habitually figured in the society column of the “Banner” as one of the intellectual leaders of Hanaford, there were moments when her self-confidence trembled before Justine’s light sallies. It was absurd, of course, given the relative situations of the two; and Mrs. Dressel, behind her friend’s back, was quickly reassured by the thought that Justine was only a hospital nurse, who had to work for her living, and had really never “been anywhere”; but when Miss Brent’s verbal arrows were flying, it seemed somehow of more immediate consequence that she was fairly well-connected, and lived in New York. No one placed a higher value on the abstract qualities of wit and irony than Mrs. Dressel; the difficulty was that she never quite knew when Justine’s retorts were loaded, or when her own susceptibilities were the target aimed at; and between her desire to appear to take the joke, and the fear of being ridiculed without knowing it, her pretty face often presented an interesting study in perplexity. As usual, she now took refuge in bringing the talk back to a personal issue.

“I can’t imagine,” she said, “why you won’t go to the Gaines’s garden-party. It’s always the most brilliant affair of the season; and this year, with the John Amhersts here, and all their party—that fascinating Mrs. Eustace Ansell, and Mrs. Amherst’s father, old Mr. Langhope, who is quite as quick and clever as you are—you certainly can’t accuse us of being dull and provincial!”

Miss Brent smiled. “As far as I can remember, Effie, it is always you who accuse others of bringing that charge against Hanaford. For my part, I know too little of it to have formed any opinion; but whatever it may have to offer me, I am painfully conscious of having, at present, nothing but your kind commendation to give in return.”

Mrs. Dressel rose impatiently. “How absurdly you talk! You’re a little thinner than usual, and I don’t like those dark lines under your eyes; but Westy Gaines told me yesterday that he thought you handsomer than ever, and that it was intensely becoming to some women to look over-tired.”

“It’s lucky I’m one of that kind,” Miss Brent rejoined, between a sigh and a laugh, “and there’s every promise of my getting handsomer every day if somebody doesn’t soon arrest the geometrical progression of my good looks by giving me the chance to take a year’s rest!”

As she spoke, she stretched her arms above her head, with a gesture revealing the suppleness of her slim young frame, but also its tenuity of structure—the frailness of throat and shoulders, and the play of bones in the delicate neck. Justine Brent had one of those imponderable bodies that seem a mere pinch of matter shot through with light and colour. Though she did not flush easily, auroral lights ran under her clear skin, were lost in the shadows of her hair, and broke again in her eyes; and her voice seemed to shoot light too, as though her smile flashed back from her words as they fell—all her features being so fluid and changeful that the one solid thing about her was the massing of dense black hair which clasped her face like the noble metal of some antique bust.

Mrs. Dressel’s face softened at the note of weariness in the girl’s voice. “Are you very tired, dear?” she asked drawing her down to a seat on the sofa.

“Yes, and no—not so much bodily, perhaps, as in spirit.” Justine Brent drew her brows together, and stared moodily at the thin brown hands interwoven between Mrs. Dressel’s plump fingers. Seated thus, with hollowed shoulders and brooding head, she might have figured a young sibyl bowed above some mystery of fate; but the next moment her face, inclining toward her friend’s, cast off its shadows and resumed the look of a plaintive child.

“The worst of it is that I don’t look forward with any interest to taking up the old drudgery again. Of course that loss of interest may be merely physical—I should call it so in a nervous patient, no doubt. But in myself it seems different—it seems to go to the roots of the world. You know it was always the imaginative side of my work that helped me over the ugly details—the pity and beauty that disinfected the physical horror; but now that feeling is lost, and only the mortal disgust remains. Oh, Effie, I don’t want to be a ministering angel any more—I want to be uncertain, coy and hard to please. I want something dazzling and unaccountable to happen to me—something new and unlived and indescribable!”

She snatched herself with a laugh from the bewildered Effie, and flinging up her arms again, spun on a light heel across the polished floor.

“Well, then,” murmured Mrs. Dressel with gentle obstinacy, “I can’t see why in the world you won’t go to the Gaines’s garden-party!” And caught in the whirlwind of her friend’s incomprehensible mirth, she still persisted, as she ducked her blonde head to it: “If you’ll only let me lend you my dress with the Irish lace, you’ll look smarter than anybody there….”

Before her toilet mirror, an hour later, Justine Brent seemed in a way to fulfill Mrs. Dressel’s prediction. So mirror-like herself, she could no more help reflecting the happy effect of a bow or a feather than the subtler influence of word and look; and her face and figure were so new to the advantages of dress that, at four-and-twenty, she still produced the effect of a young girl in her first “good” frock. In Mrs. Dressel’s festal raiment, which her dark tints subdued to a quiet elegance, she was like the golden core of a pale rose illuminating and scenting its petals.

Three years of solitary life, following on a youth of confidential intimacy with the mother she had lost, had produced in her the quaint habit of half-loud soliloquy. “Fine feathers, Justine!” she laughed back at her laughing image. “You look like a phoenix risen from your ashes. But slip back into your own plumage, and you’ll be no more than a little brown bird without a song!”

The luxurious suggestions of her dress, and the way her warm youth became it, drew her back to memories of a childhood nestled in beauty and gentle ways, before her handsome prodigal father had died, and her mother’s face had grown pinched in the long struggle with poverty. But those memories were after all less dear to Justine than the grey years following, when, growing up, she had helped to clear a space in the wilderness for their tiny hearth-fire, when her own efforts had fed the flame and roofed it in from the weather. A great heat, kindled at that hearth, had burned in her veins, making her devour her work, lighting and warming the long cold days, and reddening the horizon through dark passages of revolt and failure; and she felt all the more deeply the chill of reaction that set in with her mother’s death.

She thought she had chosen her work as a nurse in a spirit of high disinterestedness; but in the first hours of her bereavement it seemed as though only the personal aim had sustained her. For a while, after this, her sick people became to her mere bundles of disintegrating matter, and she shrank from physical pain with a distaste the deeper because, mechanically, she could not help working on to relieve it. Gradually her sound nature passed out of this morbid phase, and she took up her task with deeper pity if less exalted ardour; glad to do her part in the vast impersonal labour of easing the world’s misery, but longing with all the warm instincts of youth for a special load to lift, a single hand to clasp.