THE Rev. Silas Eaton was dead.

It was May, and the little orchard behind the parsonage was like a white and perfumed cloak flung on the shoulder of a bare hillside which was, all the rest of it, rocky pasture. Under the trees, and in the shelter of the stone walls, the grass was growing green. The apple blossoms were just beginning to fall; in any breath of wind single petals, white, stained outside with crimson, came down in flurries, like gusts of warm and aromatic snow. There was a stir of life everywhere. In the parsonage garden crown imperials had pushed their strong stalks through the damp earth, and peonies were reaching up long slender arms, each with its red curled fist of leaves, reluctant to expand until certain of the sun. The ground was spongy beneath the foot, and there were small springs bubbling up under every winter-bleached tuft of last year’s grass. The air, full of the scent of earth and growing things, was warm and sweet, yet with an edge of cold—the sword of frost in a velvet scabbard.

Life—life: and in the upper chamber of the parsonage the master lay dead.

One of the children had put a bunch of apple blossoms on the table at the head of the bed. They were not appropriate—the soft, rosy flowers beside the hard face there on the pillow; the face with its thatch of gray hair over the narrow, domelike brow, seamed and cut with wrinkles; the anxious, melancholy lips set in such icy and eternal indifference—the face of the religious egotist, stamped with inexorable sincerity, stern and cold and mean. Not a father’s face. But his daughter had put her handful of snowy flowers on the pine table, their little gnarled black stems thrust tightly down into a tumbler of water. And then she went tiptoeing out of the silent room. She heard her mother’s little, light voice downstairs in the parlor, and Elder Barnes’s low, respectful murmur in response. They were “making the arrangements.” Esther’s heart stood still, not with grief, but with misery at the strangeness of it all—her silent, meek, obedient mother saying what should or what should not happen to—father!

“And, Mr. Barnes, if it will not be a trouble, will you find out for me how much it would cost to send a telegram to my brother in Mercer?”

Esther, leaning over the banisters in the upper hall, opened her lips with astonishment. A telegram! It gave the child a sense of the dreadful importance of this May day as nothing else had done. The thought of the expense of it came next, sobering that curious sense of elation which is part of bereavement.

“Mother oughtn’t to do that. It will cost—oh, it will cost at least a dollar!”

This fifteen-year old Esther had a certain grim practicality, born of a childhood in a minister’s family on five hundred dollars a year. A dollar! And that uncle in Mercer, whom she had never seen, who had quarreled with her mother because she married her father, and who was so rich and powerful (according to a newspaper paragraph she had once read)—this uncle, who had had no connection with them in all these years—what was the use of wasting a dollar in telegraphing him? She meant to say so; and yet, when she went downstairs, after Elder Barnes had gone, and found her little mother standing at the window, looking blankly out at the garden, there was something in the mild, faded face that kept the girl silent. She came up and put her strong young arm about her, and kissed her softly.

“Mother, won’t you lie down?”

“No, dear; I am not tired. Mr. Barnes has been very kind in telling me what must be done. I do hope everything will be as—he would wish.”

They did not speak for a little while, and then Esther said, in a low voice, “Mother, I don’t want to worry you, and—and perhaps it’s very soon to speak of it, but have you thought at all of what is going to become of us?”

Her mother put up her hand with a sort of shiver. “No, no; not yet. We mustn’t talk of that yet. Oh, Esther, he is dead! Poor Silas—poor Silas!” She caught her breath like a child, and looked up at her tall daughter in a frightened way.

Esther nodded and cried a little; then she wiped her eyes, and said, hesitating: “You’re going to get a crÊpe veil, aren’t you, mother, and a black dress? And I think I ought to have a black dress.”

“We haven’t any money for new clothes, Essie,” Mrs. Eaton answered tremulously.

“But I think we ought to wear black,” Esther protested. “It isn’t proper not to.”

The other sighed with anxiety. “I don’t see how we can. He would not wish us to waste the money.”

They were very intimate, these two; for each had found the other a shelter from the fierce integrity which had ruled the family life. And now instinctively they nestled together, panting and chirping like two frightened birds, and saying to each other, “He would wish this, or that.”

But he was dead, and the face of life was suddenly changed to them both. The withdrawal of the dominant righteous will of husband and father made an abrupt silence in their lives—a silence which was as overwhelming in its way as grief. To the mother it was as though having been borne helplessly along on some powerful arm, she had been suddenly set down on her own feet, and bidden to lead and carry others. Esther’s frightened question, “What is going to become of us?” echoed in her ears like a crash of bewildering sound. She had no answer; all she knew was that she must take care of the children; work for them; fight for them—poor little weak creature!—if necessary. She was thirty-five, this mother, but she looked much older. Once she must have been pretty; one knew that by the startled softness of her hazel eyes and the delicately cut pale lips; but her forehead, rounded like a child’s, was worn and full of lines, and her whole expression so timid and anxious and deprecating that one only thought of what her life must have been to cut so deep a stamp on such gentle and vague material. It had been, since her marriage, a very uneventful life, its keenest excitement the making both ends meet on her husband’s salary. Before that there had, indeed, been the keen and exciting experience of marrying in opposition to her father’s command, and being practically disowned by her people. She was Lydia Blair, a girl of good family, gentle and dutiful, as girls were expected to be thirty years ago—one of those pleasant girls who let their elders and betters think for them, and are loved as one loves comfortable and inanimate things. And then, suddenly, had appeared this harsh, fiery, narrow New England minister, of another denomination, of another temperament—for that matter, of another class; and she had developed a will of her own and married him. Why? Everybody who knew her asked, “Why?” Perhaps afterwards she herself asked why—afterwards, when he became so intent upon saving his own soul that he had no time to win his children’s love or to make love to his wife. By the time he came to die, very likely he had forgotten he ever had made love to her. He called her “Mrs. Eaton,” and he was as used to her as he was to his battered old desk or his worn Bible. But when he came to die, he lay in his bed and watched her as he had not done these fifteen years; and once he said, when she brought him his medicine, “You’ve been a good wife, Mrs. Eaton;” and once, “You’re very kind, Lily.” But this was at the end, and the doctor said his mind was wandering. And then the end had come, in the spring night, towards dawn; and now he was lying still, as indifferent to the soft weather, the shower of apple blossoms, the two children whispering about the house, the wife staring, dry-eyed, out into the sunshine—as indifferent as he always had been.

Well, well; he was a good man, they said; and now he had gone to find the God whom he had defamed and vilified under the name of religion, imputing to Him meanness and cruelty and revenge—the passions of his own poor human nature.

And may that God have mercy on his soul!

II

Robert Blair came into the dining-room, holding the “dollar telegram” in his hand. His wife looked up at him, smiling.

“It is really shameful the way business pursues you! I am going to tell Samuel to burn all dispatches that come here. Your office is the place for those horrid yellow papers.”

“It isn’t business this time, Nellie; it’s death.”

“Oh, Robert!”

“Oh,” he hastened to explain, “it’s nothing that touches us. My sister Lydia’s husband is dead. You have heard me speak of my sister Lydia, haven’t you? It was long before your day, you baby, that she married him. Ah, well, what a pretty girl she was!” He sat down, shook his head when the man offered him some soup, and opened his napkin thoughtfully. “Well, he’s dead. He was a most objectionable person”—

Mrs. Blair looked at the butler’s back as he stood at the sideboard, and raised her eyebrows; but her husband went on, a wrinkle like a cut deepening on his forehead:—

“My father forbade it—did I never tell you about it?—but Lydia, who had always been a nonentity, suddenly acquired a will, and married him. My father never forgave her. She evidently didn’t care for any affection that didn’t include him, and cut herself off from all of us. Of course I’m sorry for her now; but I don’t feel that I have anything to reproach myself with.” He tapped the table with impatient fingers, and told the butler that he didn’t want his claret boiled. “Haven’t you any sense, Samuel? You’re a perfect fool about wine; here, throw that out of the window, and get me a fresh bottle!”

Mrs. Blair was a beautiful young woman, who, two years before, had married this irascible, successful, dogmatic man, and (so Mercer said) could wind him round any one of her pretty jeweled fingers whenever she wanted to. He certainly was very much in love—and so was she, though her particular world never believed it, alleging that she was not indifferent to the loaves and fishes.

But the fact was Mrs. Blair took the loaves and fishes with a childlike delight which meant appreciation, certainly, but not avarice. She enjoyed her wealth, and her life, and herself, immensely and openly; and that was her charm to her husband, a man immersed in large affairs, sagacious, powerful, and without imagination. He was a cultivated man, because his forbears had been educated people, of sober, comfortable wealth; hence he had gone to college, like other young men of his class, and had traveled, and had acquired an intellectual, or rather a commercial knowledge of Art. But, until he married, every instinct was for power, and the making of money. After that, though the guiding principle remained the same, a sense of beauty did awaken in him. He never flagged in his fierce and joyous and cruel passion for getting; but he delighted in his wife—perhaps as one of his own enormous machines might have delighted in a ray of sunlight dancing across its steel shafts, and flickering through the thunderous whir of its driving-wheel. He loaded the girl he married with every luxury; almost immediately she found she had nothing left to desire—from dogs to diamonds, houses, yachts, or pictures. She, poor child, realized no deprivation in seeing every wish fulfilled, and thought herself the luckiest and the happiest woman in the world. Her money, combined with a good deal of common-sense, gave her the power to interfere helpfully in the lives of less fortunate people. She called it Philanthropy, and found playing Providence to the halt, the maimed, and the blind a really keen interest. Her impulse was always to “manage”; and so, when her husband, frowning, and perhaps a little less satisfied with himself than usual, began to talk about his sister’s affairs, Mrs. Blair was instantly interested.

“Of course her husband’s death will make a difference in her income?” she said, as they went upstairs to the library. “A country minister’s salary doesn’t amount to much anyhow; but”—

“Well, she made her bed,” he interrupted sharply; “she ought to be willing to lie in it!”

“Oh, yes, of course; but now the man is dead, it’s different. I know you want to do something for her, you are so generous.”

He pulled her pretty ear at that, and told her she was a flattering little humbug. “What do you want, diplomat? You’ll bankrupt me yet. Am I to build a palace for Lily? Look here, I wrote that West Virginia college president to-day and told him I’d give him the money he wanted. It’s all your doing, but I get the name of a great educator.”

“Oh, Robert, how good you are! I think that ought to silence the people that say you ‘grind the face of the poor.’ I saw that in the paper to-day. Beasts! and you are so generous! I tell you what I want: I want you to have them come here, your sister and the children”—

“You angel!” he said. “No; that’s dangerous. We mightn’t like the brats. The boy’s name is Silas. I don’t think I could stand a cub named Silas. But the girl wouldn’t be so bad. As for Lily (we used to call her Lily when she was a girl), she is one of those gentle, colorless women, all virtue and no opinions, whom anybody could live with. Rather a fool, you know. But we’ll have them come and make us a visit, if it won’t bore you. If we like it, we can prolong it. Anyhow, I’ll see that poor Lil has a decent income. You know, my father didn’t leave her a cent. The old gentleman said he wouldn’t have ‘that hell-fire Presbyterian use any of his money for his damned heathen!’ But I’ll look after her now.”

Thus it was that a home was prepared for Silas Eaton’s widow; the offer of it came the day after the funeral, when she sat down to face the future. She had gone over her assets, in her halting, feminine way, counting up the dollars on her fingers, and subtracting the debts with a stubby lead-pencil on the back of an old envelope; and she had discovered that when all the expenses of the funeral were paid she would have in the bank one hundred and seventy-five dollars. If she could manage to sell her husband’s very limited library, she might add a few dollars to that sum; but very few.

One hundred and seventy-five dollars! She must go to some city, and go to work, so that Silas and Esther might be educated. She had got as far as that when her brother’s letter came. He would have come himself, he said, but was detained by an annoying strike in one of his rolling-mills, and so wrote to ask her to come, with the children, and visit him for a little while; “then we’ll see what can be done; but don’t worry about ways and means. I will see to all that.”

She read the straightforward, kindly words, her heart beating so she could scarcely breathe. Then she covered her face with her hands, and trembled with excitement and relief. “Oh,” she said, “the children won’t be poor! Robert will take care of us.”

III

When Mrs. Eaton went to Mercer, the change in her life was absolute and bewildering. Robert Blair’s enormous wealth was, at first, simply not to be realized. The subdued and refined magnificence of the house conveyed nothing to his sister’s mind, because she had no standard of value. The pictures and tapestries implied not money, but only beauty and joy, for she had never dreamed of buying anything but food and clothes; so how could she guess that all the money of all her sixteen years on a minister’s salary would not have purchased, say, the small misty square of canvas that held in one corner a wonderful and noble and peasant name?

The first night in the great wainscoted dining-room, with a man bringing unknown dishes to her elbow, with candles shining on elaborate and useless pieces of silver, with the glow of firelight flickering out from under a superb chimney-piece of Mexican marble, and dancing about the stately and dignified room—the beauty and the graciousness and the wonder of it was an overwhelming experience, though she had not the dimmest idea of the fortune it represented—a fortune notorious and envied the land over. That she had had no share in it until now did not wound her in the least; she was grateful for the warmth and the comfort and the kindness, now they had come; she never harked back to the painful years of silence and forgetfulness.

Her brother and his wife watched her, amused and interested; her dazzled admiration of everything was half touching, half droll. But what a confession it was! Eleanor Blair realized this, and she said to herself, warmly, that she would make up to Robert’s sister for the past. She was in her element in arranging her sister-in-law’s future; she made a dozen plans for her in the first week; but her husband laughed and shook his head.

“Wait,” he said; “time enough when we see how we get along.”

But they got along very well. The children, after the first shy awkwardness had worn off, were really attractive. Silas, an eager brown-eyed boy of eleven, lovable in spite of his name, made artless and pretty love to his pretty aunt, who found him a delightful plaything. “The serious Esther,” as her uncle called her, was a friendly little creature, when one came to know her; her common-sense commended her to Mr. Blair, and her dressmaking and her education were an immediate interest to her aunt.

So it came about that the visit was prolonged, and the project of a little establishment of her own for Mrs. Eaton gradually given up; at all events, for the present. It was very satisfactory as it was. The house was so big, they were not in the way; and Mrs. Eaton’s mourning kept her in the background in regard to society—which “was just as well,” Mrs. Blair admitted, smiling to herself—but it made no difference in her usefulness. She was really quite useful in one way or another; she could write an intelligent note to a tradesman, or reply (by formula) to a begging letter; so, by and by, she was practically her sister-in-law’s secretary, and certainly the Blairs had never had either a maid or a butler who could begin to arrange flowers for a dinner party as Mrs. Eaton did. She was silent, and rather vague, but always gentle, and ready and eager to fetch and carry for anybody. She so rarely expressed any opinion of her own, that when she did the two strong and good-natured people who made her life so easy for her could hardly take it seriously. She did, to be sure, decline to change her son’s objectionable name, on the ground that it was his name, and so could not be changed; “and,” Mrs. Blair complained once, “she won’t let me send Esther to dancing-school. I asked her if she thought dancing was wrong, and she said, ‘Oh, no; but Mr. Eaton did.’ Isn’t it funny?”

Robert Blair laughed, and said he would straighten that out. But, somehow, it was not straightened out. Esther teased, and Mrs. Blair was just a little impatient and sarcastic. But Esther did not go to dancing-school.

“I’m sorry to displease you, Eleanor,” Mrs. Eaton said, shrinking as she spoke, like a frightened animal which expects a blow, “but—I can’t allow it. Mr. Eaton would not have wished it.”

Yet, negative as she seemed, the little quiet woman was keenly alive to the advantages of this full, rich life for the children, and, indeed, for herself. Mere rest was such a luxury to her, for she had lived and worked as only a country minister’s wife must. So, to feel no anxiety, to have delicate food, to know the touch of fine linen,—in fact, to be comfortable, meant more to her than even her brother, enjoying his generosity towards her, could possibly imagine.

So life began for his sister and her children in Robert Blair’s beautiful great house in the new part of Mercer,—the new part which is not offended by the sight of those great black chimneys roaring with sapphire and saffron flames, or belching monstrous coils of black smoke, threaded with showers of sparks,—those chimneys and roofs which are not beautiful to look upon, but which have made the “new” part of Mercer possible. When Mrs. Eaton came to her brother’s house, these unlovely foundations of his fortune were still for a month. There was a strike on, and Mercer was cleaner and quieter than it had been for many months,—in fact, than it had been since the last strike. The clang and clamor of the machine-shops, the scream of the steel saws biting into the living, glowing rails, the thunderous crash of plates being tested in the hot gloom of the foundries, had all stopped.

“And, oh dear me,” said Mrs. Blair, “what a relief it is! Of course it’s very annoying to have them strike, and all that, but when one drives into town to get to the other side of the river, the noise is perfectly intolerable. And when the wind is in that direction, we can really hear the roar even out here.”

She said this to her clergyman, who looked at her with a veiled sparkle of humor in his handsome eyes.

“So the puddlers shall starve to make a Mercer holiday,” he said good-naturedly.

“If they choose to strike, they must take the consequences,” she replied, with some spirit. “Besides, they are the most ungrateful creatures! Well, I’m sure I don’t know what we’re coming to!”

“Something may be coming to us,” her visitor said, with a whimsical look, but he sighed, and got up to take his leave. His charming parishioner sighed too, prettily, and said with much feeling,—

“Of course, Mr. West, if there are any cases that need help, you’ll let me know.”

“But, Nellie,” said Mrs. Eaton, who had been sitting silent, as usual, and quite overlooked by the other two, “is there any use in helping the people who are in trouble because they are out of work, and yet not letting them go to work?”

Mrs. Blair laughed, in spite of herself, the protest was so unexpected, and so absurd, coming from this meek source. “My dear,” she said, “you don’t understand; they can go to work if they want to.”

“Well,” Mrs. Eaton said anxiously, “I should think, either they are wrong, and so you shouldn’t help them, or they are right, and they ought to get what they want.”

Her sister stared at her, and then laughed again, greatly amused; but William West put on his glasses and gave her a keen look.

“Mrs. Eaton, don’t you want to help us on the Organized Relief Association?”

“Yes, sir,” said Lydia Eaton, “if there’s anything I can do.”

“I don’t want to steal your services away from any other parson,” he said pleasantly. “I suppose you belong to Mr. Hudson’s flock? You are a Presbyterian, of course?”

“No, sir, I am not,” she said, the color rising in her face.

“Oh, then you do belong to me?” he said smiling.

“I’m not an Episcopalian,” she answered, with a frightened look.

“Then what on earth are you?” Mrs. Blair asked her, laughing.

“I’m not—anything,” she said, her voice trembling; “but, Eleanor, please don’t speak of it. The children must not know it. Mr. Eaton would want them to be members of his church. So we must always go there.”

There was an instant’s awkward pause. Mrs. Blair looked very disapproving.

“Why, Lydia,” she said, “do you mean you don’t believe things? Why, I never had a doubt in my life!” she exclaimed, turning to the minister, who was silent.

Mrs. Eaton caught her breath, and looked at him too, her mild eyes full of pain. “Nobody ever asked me before. I am sorry, but I can’t help it. The Bible says people go to hell; but God is good, so I don’t believe the Bible. But Mr. Eaton would wish me to go to church.”

The perfectly simple logic, so primitive as to stop at “the Bible says,” was irresistibly funny; yet, to William West, infinitely touching. But he put the discussion aside quietly.

“So you will come on our committee?” he said. “We shall be glad to have you.”

But when he went away he laughed a little to himself. “The iron heel of Edwards, I suppose. But how direct! Two and two make four. She is incapable of understanding that they sometimes make five.”

But Mrs. Blair did not dismiss it so lightly. She was annoyed at the protest about the strikers, and that impelled her to straighten out Mrs. Eaton’s religious beliefs. There was some irritation in her voice as she began, but she was in earnest, and stopped in the middle of “proofs” to tell Samuel to say she was “not at home.”

“But, Eleanor, you are,” Mrs. Eaton protested in a frightened way.

“My dear, that is a form of speech.”

“But it makes Samuel tell a lie,” she said nervously.

“Oh, Lily, don’t be silly,” Mrs. Blair said impatiently, and then jumped from hell to the strikers,—though, as it happened, the distance between them was not so great after all. “Really, now, Lydia, I don’t think you ought to speak as you did before Mr. West about the men. In the first place, business isn’t philanthropy, and Robert can’t give in to them. And in the second place, they are behaving outrageously! I should think you would have more loyalty to Robert than to seem to uphold them.”

“I only meant”—Mrs. Eaton began breathlessly.

“Oh, my dear, you don’t know what you mean,” Mrs. Blair interrupted, laughing and good-natured again. “But just remember, will you, how kind Robert is? It seems to me he is always doing things for this ungrateful place. Look at the fountain in the square; that’s the last thing.”

“But wouldn’t the men rather have had running water in the tenements?” Mrs. Eaton said; “there are only hydrants down in the back yards.”

However, as that first year in Mercer slipped by, there were very few such jars. The strike ended early in the fall, and there was nothing to call out any objectionable opinion from Mrs. Eaton on that line.

“As for Lydia,” Robert Blair said once, “you say ‘go,’ and she goeth. She has absolutely no will of her own.”

This was, apparently, quite true. At all events, she had a genius for obedience, and a terror of responsibility. In the organized relief-work which Mrs. Blair’s clergyman had proposed, obedience necessitated responsibility sometimes, and no one knew how the silent little creature suffered when she had to decide anything. But she did decide, usually with remarkable but very simple common-sense.

“And always on the supposition that two and two make four,” Mr. West said to himself. He found her literalness a little aggravating just at first, but it was very diverting. He used to put on his glasses and watch her anxious face when she talked to him or received his orders (for such his requests or suggestions seemed to her); and he would ask her questions to draw out her astounding simplicity and directness of thought, and find her as refreshing as a child. She used to sit up before him, saying, “Yes, sir,” and “No, sir,” and looking, with her startled eyes, like a little gray rabbit—for at the end of a year she took off her black dress, and wore instead soft grays that were very pretty and becoming. Her absolute literalness gave him much entertainment; but she never knew it. If she had guessed it, she would have been humbly glad to have been ridiculous, if it had amused him.

And so the first year and a half went by.

IV

It was the next winter that she asked her first question.

“Mr. West,” she said, after making notes of this or that case that needed looking after (for she was practically visitor for St. James now),—“Mr. West, I would like to ask you something.”

“Do, my dear Mrs. Eaton,” he answered heartily.

“I would like to ask you,” she said, her eyes fixed on his, to lose no shade of meaning in his reply, “do you think it would be right for one person to live on money that another person had stolen?”

“If they knew it was stolen, of course not!” he said, smiling. “Has a pickpocket offered to go halves with you?”

“No, sir,” she answered, so gravely that her listener’s eyes twinkled. She made no explanation, but went away with a troubled look. The next time she saw him she had another question:—

“But suppose the person who lived on the money the other person stole needed it very much. Suppose they hadn’t anything else in the world. Suppose their children hadn’t anything else. Would it be their business to ask where it came from, Mr. West?”

“If it was their business to spend it, it would be,” he told her. “Oh, my dear lady, the question of complicity is a pretty big one!” He sighed, thinking how little she realized that she was guessing at the riddle of the painful earth.

Again she went away, her face falling into lines of care. But William West never thought of the matter again. Indeed, he had no time to think of his quiet almoner; those were alarming days in Mercer. The echoes of that storm which shook not only the town, but the very State and nation, are still rolling and muttering in the dark places of the land.

Another strike had begun in October. As for the deep and far-reaching causes, the economic and industrial necessities, the vast plans of organizations and trusts, they have no place in this statement of the way in which one ignorant woman regarded their effects—a woman living quietly in her brother’s house, doing her work, expending her little charities, trying to relieve the dreadful misery of those wintry days, with about as much success as a child who plays beside some terrific torrent and tries to dam it with his tiny bank of twigs and pebbles. Robert Blair’s sister had no economic or ethical theories; she had only an anguished heart at the suffering in that dreary mill town, a dreadful bewilderment at its contrast with the untouched luxury of her brother’s house. That she should find a child in one of the tenements dying at its mother’s barren breast, while her own children fared sumptuously every day; that a miserable man should curse her because her brother was robbing him of work, and warmth, and decency, even, while she must bless that same brother for what he was giving her, was a dreadful puzzle. As she understood the situation, this misery existed because her brother would no longer give even fourteen cents an hour to human beings who had to stand half naked in the scorch of intense furnaces, reeking with sweat, taking a breathless moment to plunge waist deep into tanks of cold water; to men who worked where the crash of exploding slag or the accidental tipping of a ladle might mean death; to gaunt and stunted creatures, hollow-eyed, with bleared and sodden faces, whose incessant toil to keep alive had crushed out the look of manhood, and left them silent, hopeless, brutish, with only one certainty in their stupefied souls: “men don’t grow old in the mills.” ... That these things should be, while she was clothed in soft raiment bought by wealth which these desperate beings had helped to create—meant to this ignorant woman that there was something wrong somewhere. It was not for her to say what or where. She had no ambition to reform the world. She did not protest against the “unearned increment,” nor did she have views as to “buying labor in the cheapest market.” She did not know anything about such phrases. The only thing that concerned her was whether she, living on her brother’s money, had any part or lot in the suffering about her? She grew nervous and haggard and more distrait and literal than ever. She wished she dared lay her troubles before the wise, gentle, strong man who, to her, was all that was good and great. But it did not seem to her right to criticise her brother to his clergyman. She never realized how amusing her simplicity might be, laid up against the enormous complexity of the industrial question; to her it was only: “If Robert is rich, and doesn’t give his workmen enough to live on, are not the children and I stealing from the men in living on Robert’s money?”

This little question, applied to the relations of capital and labor, is of course absurd; but she asked it all the same, this soft, negative, biddable creature. She had gone to take some food to a hungry household, and she went away burning with shame because she was not hungry! It had been a cold, bright November day; she went past one of the silent furnaces along the black cinder path to the river-bank, where the flat cones of slag were dumped; some of them were still slightly warm.

It was quiet enough here to think: After all, Robert’s money did so much good; there was the great fountain in the square, and the hospital, and the free night school. And think of what he was doing for Essie and Silas! Oh, it surely wasn’t her business to ask why he cut the men’s wages down!

There was a flare of sunset flushing the calm blue of the upper heavens, and in the river, running black and silent before her, a red glow smouldered and brightened. Behind her, and all along the opposite bank, the furnaces were still. Oh, the misery of that black stillness! If only she could see again the monstrous sheets of flame, orange, and azure, bursting with a roar of sparks from under the dampers of the great chimneys. It would mean work and warmth and food to so many! By some unsuggested flash of memory the parsonage garden came swiftly to her mind. It must be lying chill in the wintry sunset; she could see the little house behind it, with its bare, clean poverty; she wished she were back in it again with the two children! The beauty and the luxury of her brother’s house seemed suffocating and intolerable; and yet would it feed the strikers if she should starve?—the vision of her own destitution without her brother’s money was appalling. She sat down on a piece of slag, a little faint at the thought. Just then, from down below her, on the great heap of refuse, she heard voices.

“Come farther up; they’re hotter higher up,” a woman said shrilly.

Then a miserable little group came clambering over the great cones of cooling slag, and a child cried out joyously, “This here one’s hot, mammy!”

The woman, catching sight of Robert Blair’s sister, though not recognizing her, said harshly:—

“You bet hangman Blair has a fire in his house to-day. Well, thank God, he ain’t made no cut in slag, yet; we can get a bit of warmth here. I wish he may freeze in his bed!”

Lydia Eaton answered, stammering and incoherent, something about the cold weather; and then, she was so overstrained and nervous, she burst out crying. “Oh, won’t you please let me give you this?” she said, and put some money into the woman’s hand.

She went away, stumbling, because her eyes were blurred with tears, and saying to herself,—

“What shall I do?”

She almost ran into Mr. West on Baker Street, and stopped abruptly, putting her hands on his arm, and, in her agitation, shaking it violently, her whole face convulsed and terrified.

“Tell me—you know; you are good: whose fault is it? Robert’s—for all—this?”

He understood instantly, and was very gentle with her.

“My dear Mrs. Eaton, that is a very big question. It isn’t any one man’s fault. It seems strange, but the weather in India may be the reason we are all so wretched in Mercer. Your brother may be forced to make this cut by great laws, which, perhaps, you cannot understand.”

“But we go on being warm,” she said, “and it is cold. Oh, those little children had to get warm on the slag! Oh, sir, I don’t believe the Saviour would have been warm while the children were cold!”

She looked at him passionately, abruptly applying the precepts of the Founder of his religion.

“Ah, well, you know,” William West said kindly, “this whole matter is so enormously complicated”—And then he stammered a little, for, after all, how could he explain to this poor little frightened, ignorant soul that we have learned how injurious to the race would be the literal application of the logic of the Sermon on the Mount? Nowadays the disciple is wiser than his master, and the servant more prudent than his Lord; we know that to feed the five thousand with loaves and fishes, without receiving some equivalent, would be to pauperize them. But of course Mrs. Eaton could not be made to understand that. The clergyman quieted her, somehow; perhaps just by his gentle pitifulness; or else her reverence for him silenced her. She did not ask him any more questions; and there was no one else to ask, except her brother, and just now it would have been hard to find the chance to ask Robert Blair anything.

The strike had slowly involved all the mills owned by a syndicate of which he was chairman. He had to go to South Bend, where the great smelting furnaces are; he was mobbed there, though with no worse results than the unpleasantness of eggs and cabbage stalks; still, the wickedness of those dreadful creatures was something too awful, Mrs. Blair said, crying with anger and fright over the newspaper account. At still another mill town a ghastly box reached him, labeled: “Starved by the Blair syndicate.” Robert Blair paled and sickened at its contents, but he swore under his breath: “Let them starve their brats, if they want to; it isn’t my business. There’s work for them if they want it; but the curs would rather loaf. This country can go to the devil before I’ll give in to them!”

He did not get back to Mercer until December. “I wouldn’t let the fools keep me from you on Christmas,” he told his wife savagely, and caught her in his arms with a sort of rage. “Were you very lonely? You’ve been nervous—I can see it in your face. You are paler!” He ground his teeth; that those brutes should have made her paler!

“Of course I was lonely,” she said, smiling, though her eyes were bright with tears, “and I’ve been frightened almost to death about you, too. Oh, that mob!”

“You little goose; didn’t I tell you there was no danger? I always had two detectives. But I used to get anxious about you. I telegraphed the mayor to detail an officer to be always about the house. Heaven knows what’s going to be the end of this business, Nell! Well, sweetheart, may I have some dinner, or must I go and dress first?”

“No. You’re dreadfully dusty, but I can’t lose sight of you for a moment,” she said gayly. “Robert, I should have died if you hadn’t been at home for Christmas!”

His sister and the children met him at the dining-room door—Silas, capering about with delight; Esther, prettier than ever, coming to hang on his arm, and rub her cheek against his shoulder, and say how glad she was to see him.

“Robert, it’s perfectly disgusting,” Mrs. Blair complained, “but a delegation insists upon seeing you to-night; they are coming about eight.”

“Oh, confound it!” he said frowning; “the strike, of course? A lot of parsons meddling with what they know nothing about.”

“There are parsons, I suppose,” she said, “but the mayor is coming. Do get rid of them as soon as you can, so that I may have a little of you.”

She looked so pretty as she sat at the head of her table, beseeching him, that he declared he would kick the delegation out if they stayed over ten minutes; then he tossed a small white velvet box across the roses in the big silver bowl in the middle of the table, and watched her flash of joy as she opened it.

“It seems to me I have some more boxes, somewhere,” he said good-humoredly. “There, Essie! if your aunt Eleanor had packed me off to get into my dress-suit, I wouldn’t have found this one in my pocket. Lydia, you sober old lady, can you wear that? As for you, Silas, you don’t want any gewgaws, do you? We fellows think more of a bit of paper with three figures on it, hey?”

“There! there’s the bell. It’s your horrid delegation,” Mrs. Blair cried. “Just let them wait till you finish dinner. And do get rid of them quickly. Mr. Hudson, Lydia’s minister, will be there; tell him to wait a minute when the others have gone. I want to speak to him.”

“I thought little Hudson had more sense,” Robert Blair grumbled, rising and going into the library to meet a dozen of his fellow-citizens, some of them men with grave and startled faces, who from pity for the three thousand fools who were turning Mercer upside down, and from good-humored interest in the affairs of their powerful townsman, were beginning to feel the sting of personal alarm about their own concerns.

These men were saying to each other what the newspapers had been saying for two months, that Robert Blair, for vanity or obstinacy or greed, was bringing alarming disaster not merely upon a few thousand desperate and hungry and unreasonable puddlers, but upon the respectable well-to-do business population of his city.

“And he’s got to stop it!” the mayor said angrily.

“It would be a good job if somebody would blow him up with dynamite,” said the Baptist deacon, who was the wealthiest merchant in town. “He’ll swamp us all, if we don’t look out.”

As for the clergyman, he looked very miserable, for he had the expenses of his church and his own salary in mind, and between offending Mr. Blair and not protesting against the continuance of the strike, the poor little man was between the devil and the deep sea.

“Gentlemen,” said Robert Blair, calm and hard (“as nails,” the Baptist deacon said), “I appreciate the honor of your call, and I hope I have listened with proper courtesy and patience to what you had to say; but allow me to call your attention to certain facts which seem to contradict your assertions that you suspect that I am not acting for the public good in this matter of the strike. Mr. Mayor, if my wealth had been gained by the subversion of law and order, as you suggest, I am sure you could not have accepted any of it for your campaign—ah—expenses. For you, Mr. Davis, a church member, a deacon, if I mistake not, I need only remind you of your willingness to borrow, I will not say how many thousands, as the basis of your most successful business (though I would not be thought to underrate your own prudence and economy in paying your women clerks a little less than they can live on). And as for my worthy friend here, the Rev. Mr. Hudson, if my money were, as he has so delicately implied, ‘blood-money,’ I cannot think he would have accepted the contribution I had the privilege of making towards the alterations of his church. Gentlemen, you have felt it your duty to remonstrate with me upon my way of making money; so long as you are content to spend that money, I cannot believe that your remonstrances are based upon anything else than the inconvenience to yourselves of certain exigencies which I deeply regret, but which result from methods which commend themselves to me, and which, I observe, you apply in your own concerns: you all pay as little as you can for what you want; I pay as little as I can for labor. For your particular request that I submit to the demands of the strikers, I can only say that when Mr. Davis will give away in charity the fortune built upon the outcome of those methods; when his honor the Mayor will refund the—ah—expenses of his recent successful campaign and call it conscience-money; when the Rev. Mr. Hudson will give up improving his church—in fact, when you will all consent to buy your shirts or your potatoes in the dearest market—I will consent to alter the methods whereby I have had the honor of serving you. We will all reduce together. When we can do that, I will recognize a moral issue, as Mr. Hudson so admirably expresses it. Until then I will try to mind my own business. If it were not perhaps discourteous, I would recommend a like course of action to this committee. Gentlemen, I bid you good-evening.”

He was pale with rage. He forgot his wife’s message to the minister; he bowed, and stood with folded arms watching the withdrawal of the humiliated and angry delegation, “with their tails between their legs,” the little clergyman said to himself, stung by the impudent injustice of it all.

Mr. Blair went into the drawing-room, breathing hard with the restraint he had put upon himself, for his coldly insolent words had been no outlet to his anger. “Don’t talk about it,” he said violently. “I won’t hear another word on the subject. Nell, I thought that little Hudson was not entirely a jackass, though he is a parson; he had the impertinence to say that ‘Brother West’ agreed with him. I don’t believe it! But if it’s true, why, then, West is a meddling idiot, like all the rest of these damned self-seeking philanthropists.”

“Robert, dear! the children,” murmured Mrs. Blair nervously.

His face was dully red, and his blue, fierce eyes cut like knives; one felt an unspoken epithet applied to the children, who watched him furtively, with frightened glances, and moved about awkwardly, speaking to each other in undertones. A moment before, everything had been full of charm and graciousness; their pretty aunt sat, indolent and graceful, on a yellow sofa, leaning back against some ivory-satin cushions, with a great yellow-shaded lamp shining down on her delicate dark beauty; the flicker of the fire behind the sparkling brass dogs went leaping softly about the room, glowing on the walls, which were covered above the white wainscoting with yellow damask, on which the candle-light from the high sconces fell with a yellow shine; everything was golden and bright and rich, and the warm still air was delicate with the scent of violets. Then into it burst this violent and angry presence.

There is no embarrassment quite like the embarrassment of listening to a person for whom one has a regard making a fool of himself. Nobody spoke. Robert Blair tramped up and down, kicked a little gilded stool half across the room, caught his foot in a rug, stumbled, and then swore. Mrs. Blair’s fox-terrier, Pat, shrunk under a table and looked at him, trembling.

“Silas,” said Mrs. Eaton, “you and Esther must go upstairs.”

“The trouble is,” said her brother to his wife, “these men don’t know what they are talking about; they don’t know anything about the market; they don’t know anything about the necessities of trade; all they know is their dividends; if they were cut, there’d be a howl! But they presume to dictate to us; to tell us the money is blood-money; all the same, they are ready enough to spend it on their own carcasses!”

Mrs. Eaton had closed the door on her children, and came and stood by a little silver-cluttered table, under the big yellow lamp. “I think Robert is quite right,” she said.

The approval of this mild creature was like an edge laid against the tense thread of Robert Blair’s anger. He burst into a laugh.

“Bless your heart, Lydia, I didn’t know you were in the room. Well, my dear, I’m glad you approve of me.”

“I don’t, brother.”

“Oh, you don’t? Where are the chicks? Sent them out of the room because I used bad words? Well, I oughtn’t to swear in the drawing-room, that’s a fact. Place aux Dames! But after all, I only dropped the ‘place.’”

“Oh!” his wife said; and then, “you are very naughty;” and pouted, and pulled him down on his knees beside her.

“I thought it was very natural to be angry at the rug,” Mrs. Eaton said breathlessly; “I’ve often felt like speaking that way myself”—

“Do, Lydia, do!” Mr. Blair interrupted, with a laugh.

“—but Mr. Eaton would never have allowed the children to hear, and”—

“Come, now! Haven’t I apologized? Don’t rub it in. I’ll give you something extra to put in the plate on Sunday, because I did pitch into your man Hudson like the devil! I told him so long as he spent ‘blood-money’ for his darned improvements, he couldn’t reproach me for earning it.”

“Oh,” Lydia Eaton said, her hands squeezed together,—“oh, no! He is quite different from—me. It is you who are spending the—blood-money on the improvements. If he were spending it on himself, like—like me, it would be different.”

Her brother looked up at her from his footstool at his wife’s feet, first amused, and then bored.

“My dear Lily, I’m sure I don’t know what you are talking about. I’m sorry if I stepped on your toes about your parson. He means well. Only he is a parson, so I suppose he can’t help being rather ladylike in business matters. Do drop the subject; I am sick of the whole thing. How is your conservatory, Nell? Are those violets the result of your agricultural efforts?”

“I think, Robert,” his sister said in her low voice, that shivered and broke, “I must just say one thing more: I must give you back this beautiful thing you gave me at dinner. And I must go away with the children.”

“What under the sun!” he began, frowning; then he got up and stood on the hearth-rug, his back to the fire. “Lydia, I hope you are not going to be a fool? What are you talking about? Sit down,—sit down! You’re as white as a ghost. Lily, I’m afraid you’re a great goose. What’s the matter?” He could not help softening as he looked at her. She stood there by the little tottering table, loaded with its dozens of foolish bits of silver, so tense and quivering that even his impatient eyes could not fail to see her agitation.

“Robert, you have been so kind to us; you are so good to us,—oh, I don’t know how I can do it!” she broke into an anguished sob,—“but I must. Mr. Eaton would never have let the children be supported on money that was not—that was not good.”

There was silence; the clock in the hall chimed ten. Then Eleanor Blair, sitting up, pale and angry, said,—

“Well, upon my word!”

Her husband looked at his sister with sudden kindness in his eyes. “Lily, you don’t understand. When I said what I did to Mr. Hudson,—of course, that has put it into your head,—I didn’t really mean it. In the first place, I’m an honest man (I’ll just mention that in passing), and it is not your business nor his to judge my business methods. It isn’t a pretty thing to look a gift-horse in the mouth, Lil.”

“It isn’t what you said to Mr. Hudson,” she answered. “I’ve been thinking about it for nearly a year. Robert, you pay them so little, and I—I have all this.”

She looked about the beautiful room with a sort of fright: it seemed to her that the warm and stately walls hid human misery lying close outside,—hunger and hatred, cold and sickness, and the terror of to-morrow. The impudent luxury of this enormous wealth struck her like a blow on the mouth.

“They,” she said, with a sob, “are hungry.”

Her brother, divided between irritation and amusement, was touched in spite of himself.

“My dear Lily,” he said, “you can’t understand this thing. To put it vulgarly, you’ve bitten off more than you can chew. Look here, the men can go to work to-morrow if they want to; but they don’t want to. I offer them work, and they can take it or leave it. Well, they leave it. It’s their affair, not mine.”

But she shook her head miserably. “I don’t understand it. If you were poor, too, it would be different.”

“Well, really!” said Mrs. Blair.

But Robert Blair was wonderfully patient.

“There’s another thing you must remember, Lily; these people are far better off on what I am willing to pay them than they were in Europe, where most of them came from.”

“But, Robert,” she said passionately, “because they could be worse off doesn’t seem to be any reason why they shouldn’t be better off. And—it isn’t kind.”

“Kind?” Her brother looked at her blankly, and then, with a shout of laughter, “Lydia, you are as good as a play! No, my dear; I don’t run my mills for kindness.”

“But,” she said, almost in a whisper, “whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you”—

Mrs. Blair made a gesture of disgust.

“—oh, brother, I didn’t mean to find fault with you. Only with myself. I—I haven’t any right to spend money that I—don’t know about.”

“Well, anything more?” Robert Blair said, a little tired of her foolishness. “My dear, like the parson, you mean well; but you are a great goose!”

As for his wife, she did not even answer Mrs. Eaton’s tremulous “good-night.”

V

The husband and wife looked at each other; then Robert Blair flung his head back with a laugh.

“She is perfectly delicious!”

“She is perfectly ungrateful, and I believe she means it.”

“Oh, nonsense! Lil hasn’t mind enough to mean anything; and I’ll tell you another thing: in spite of her quiet ways, she really has a good deal of worldly wisdom. She knows what it is to those two children to have me interested in them. Don’t worry your little head”—

“Oh, I don’t worry,” she answered. “If she is going to presume to criticise you, I don’t want her under my roof; the sooner she leaves the better!”

“Spitfire!” he told her, kissing her pretty hand, and forgetting all about his sister’s absurdity, and the strike, and the men and women shivering in the tenements down in the miserable mill town.

But he remembered it all the next morning at the breakfast-table, for Lydia Eaton’s white face was too striking to escape comment. Mrs. Blair was not present, preferring to be, at what she called the “brutal hour of eight,” in her own room, with a tray and her maid and a novel.

“What’s the matter?” Mr. Blair said kindly. “Are you ill, Lily?”

“It’s what I told you last night, Robert,” she said nervously.

The solemn Samuel, all ears, but looking perfectly deaf, brought a dish to his master’s elbow. Robert Blair closed his lips with a snap. Then he said,—

“Please make no reference to that folly before Eleanor.”

But of course it was only a respite. The folly had to be repeated to Eleanor—discussed, argued, denounced, until the whole atmosphere of the house was charged with excitement.

Through it all Lydia Eaton came and went, and did her packing.

“Well,” her sister-in-law said contemptuously, “perhaps you’ll tell me how you mean to feed Esther and Silas? You have a right to starve yourself, but I have some feeling for the children!”

“I am going to work,” the other answered, trembling.

“Lydia,” Mrs. Blair said passionately, “next to your ingratitude to your brother, I must say your selfishness in ruining your own children is the most dreadful thing I ever heard of!”

But Mrs. Eaton’s preparations went on. Not that there was so much to do; but she had to find rooms, and then she had to find work. It was the latter exigency which fanned Robert Blair’s contemptuous annoyance, which refused to take the matter seriously, into sudden flames of rage, for his sister saw fit to apply at a shop for the position of saleswoman. Of course it came to his ears, and that night the storm burst on Mrs. Eaton’s head. As for Robert Blair, when the interview was over, during which he spared Mrs. Eaton no detail of his furious mortification, he said savagely to his wife: “I wish you’d go and see if West cannot bring her to her senses. Get him to influence her to some decency. Tell him, if she’s set in this outrageous ingratitude, I wish he would persuade her to let me send her East, to some other place, and let her work (and starve!) where she won’t disgrace me. Think of it, Eleanor—that man Davis coming whining and grinning, and saying he ‘would do what he could to give my sister a position as saleslady, but I knew the times were bad’! Damn him!”

“Good heavens, Robert! You don’t mean to say she’s been to Davis’s? My dear, she is insane! Yes, I’ll go and see Mr. West to-morrow.”

She went. It was a raw, bleak morning; the thin, chill winter rain blurred the windows of her brougham, and the mud splashed up against the glass; the wheels sunk into deep ruts of the badly paved streets, and the uncomfortable jolt and sway of the softly padded carriage added to her indignation at her sister-in-law.

William West did not live in the new part of Mercer, with its somewhat gorgeous houses; nor yet in the old part, which was charming and dignified, and inclined to despise everything not itself; but in the middle section, near the rows of rotten and tumbling tenements, and within a stone’s throw of bleak and hideous brick blocks, known as “Company boarding-houses.” He had come here to live shortly after a certain crash in his own life; a personal blow, which left him harder, and more silent, and more earnest. He had been jilted, people said, and wondered why, for a while, and then forgot it, as he, absorbed in his work, seemed also to forget it.

Mrs. Blair, her fox-terrier under one arm, stepped out of the carriage, frowning to find herself in this squalid street; but once inside the big, plain, comfortable house where William West lived all by himself, her face relaxed and took a certain arch and charming discontent; there was a big fire blazing in the minister’s library, and the dignity and refinement of the room, the smell of leather-covered books, the gleam of pictures and bronzes, and a charming bit of tapestry hanging on the chimney-piece restored her sense of mental as well as physical comfort. When he entered, and dragged a big chair in front of the fire for her, and looked at her with that grave attention which seems like homage, and was part of the man, being called forth by his washerwoman as well as by Mrs. Robert Blair, she felt almost happy again, and assured that everything would come out right.

“Mr. West,” she began, “you’ve got to help us; we’re in such absurd difficulties! Will you?”

“Command me,” he said, smiling.

“You haven’t heard, then? It’s Lydia—Mr. Blair’s sister, you know. She has taken it into her head that”—the color came into Mrs. Blair’s face—“that she won’t let Robert support her, because she thinks he isn’t treating the strikers properly. I’m sure I don’t know what idea she has! But she won’t accept his money. Did you ever hear of such a thing?”

William West’s face sobered instantly. “I have not seen Mrs. Eaton for a fortnight,” he said; “I had no idea”—He got up, frowning, the lines about his lips perplexed and anxious.

“I’m sure,” the pretty woman went on, growing angrier as she spoke, “I don’t care what she does,—I’ve lost all patience with her,—but to throw the children’s future away! And it’s so embarrassing for Robert.” Then she told him fully the whole situation. “She keeps saying,” Mrs. Blair ended, “that ‘Mr. Eaton’ wouldn’t have allowed the children to be supported on money that ‘wasn’t good.’ Did you ever hear such impertinence?”

“Ah, well,” he protested good-naturedly, “I’m sure Mrs. Eaton does not mean to be impertinent; and I’m sure she does appreciate her brother’s kindness. Only, she is trying to work out a great problem on an individual basis, which is of course very foolish. But the dear little lady must not be allowed—And yet”—He paused, frowning and perplexed.

“Ah, but, Mr. West, when she has the assurance to quote the Bible to her own brother—it seems to me that’s rather impertinent? Fancy! something about ‘doing unto others’—and ‘being partaker’ if she spent the money that had been ‘wrung from the strikers.’ Upon my word! ‘Wrung!’ As I said to my husband, ‘Upon my word, I never heard of such a thing.’”

“Neither did I,” William West said dryly. “We are all of us in the habit of taking our dividends, and not looking at the way they are earned. Mrs. Eaton is certainly unusual.”

“Well, do you think you can influence her?” Mrs. Blair insisted. “I don’t mean to stay with us; I don’t think that would be possible or desirable now. But to let Mr. Blair give her an allowance, so that she can take care of the children. It is positively wicked to think how she is ruining the children!”

“Won’t she take any money from your husband?”

“Not a cent, if you please! Not a penny. She keeps saying that if she can’t feel that the source of the money is all right, she can’t spend it.” Mrs. Blair cuffed her dog prettily with her muff, and kissed his little sleek head. “Isn’t she a goose, Pat, you darling?”

“Her principle would turn the world upside down,” the clergyman said.

“That’s just what I say!” cried Mrs. Blair.

“If we all said we would have nothing to do with the ‘blood of the just person,’ what would become of the railroads and the coal-mines and the oil trusts? What would become of our dividends from industrial stocks if we insisted on knowing that the workmen were honestly paid? How could we eat meat, if we looked into the slaughter-house?”

Mrs. Blair looked puzzled.

“And she is going to work for her living?” He was profoundly moved. “Good heavens, out of the mouths of babes! What a primitive expression of social responsibility! But surely, Mrs. Blair, we must respect her honesty? As for her judgment, that’s another matter.”

Eleanor Blair’s blank astonishment left her speechless for a moment; then she flung up her head haughtily.

“Mr. West, do you mean to say”—she began.

“My dear Mrs. Blair,” he said quietly, “I mean to say that little Mrs. Eaton, in her simple way, puts her finger right on the centre of this whole miserable question, in which, directly or indirectly, we are all involved: she has recognized our complicity. Of course she is going to work the wrong way—at least, I suppose she is. God knows! But what courage,—what directness!”

“Do I understand,” Eleanor Blair said, rising, “that you approve of my sister-in-law’s extraordinary conduct?”

“I approve of her,” he said, smiling. “If you ask me whether I think she is doing right, I should say ‘Yes,’ because she is acting upon her conscience. Is she doing wisely? No; because civilization is compromise. We have either got to bow in the House of Rimmon, or go and live in the woods like Thoreau and eat dried peas. I’ll tell her so, if you want me to. But as for attempting to influence her, I cannot do that. The place whereon we stand is holy ground.”

Mrs. Blair picked up her dog and set her teeth; then she looked slightly beyond the clergyman, with half-shut eyes, and said,—

“Will you be good enough to have my carriage called?”

“I never would have been brave enough,” Mrs. Eaton said meekly to Mr. West, when the dreadful step was actually taken, “I never could have done it, but I knew Mr. Eaton would have wished it; and, besides, I felt I was taking the food of those poor people.”

“Well, no,” he began, “that is really not reasonable”—But he stopped; this timid creature could not reason—she could only feel. “Fools,” he said to himself, as he left her, “rush in where the political economist fears to tread. She is a fool, poor little soul, but”—

The winter had passed heavily away. Mrs. Eaton had succeeded in getting a place in Mr. Davis’s shop—“where,” the proprietor used to say, “having Robert Blair’s sister for a saleslady is money in my pocket! She’s better than a ‘fire-and-water bargain sale.’” So she stood behind a counter and sold ribbon, and was stared at and whispered about. But she had very keen anxieties about food and clothes, and the children’s discontent lay like a weight upon the mother’s heart—which ached, too, with the pain of the second wrench from the affection and kindness of her family. Fortunately her peculiar logic did not lead her to reject the Baptist deacon’s money, which was certainly much more doubtful than her brother’s. By some mental process of her own, the fact that she worked for it seemed to make its acceptance moral. She had no leisure now to work for Mr. West; but the remembrance of his patience and gentleness always made a little pause of peace in her heavy thoughts. It was a hard, bleak life for this silent little creature; and the rector of St. James, himself a silent soul, watched her live it, and pondered many things.

The strike had broken in February. The men went back to their work—defeat, like some bitter wind, blowing the flames of resentment into fiercer heat, which “next time” would mean destroying victory.

“Will it be like Samson pulling down the temple upon himself?” William West wondered, depressed and hopeless.

It was night—a summer night; sweet and still over in the old-fashioned part of Mercer, where the fragrance of roses overflowed the high brick walls of the gardens. Here in the mill district it was not sweet, and all night long the mills roared and crashed, and the flames bursting out of vast chimneys flared and faded, and flared again.

William West was alone in his library. His sermon for the next morning had been finished early in the week; he had looked it over the last thing, and now the manuscript was slipped into its black velvet cover. He sat, his head on his hand, tapping with strong, restless fingers the arm of his chair. The old question, always more or less present in the mind of this man, was clamoring for an answer: How far are we responsible? Through how many hands must dishonest money, cruel money, mean money, pass to be cleansed? Is it clean when it comes to me—this dividend or that? Shall a man, or a railroad, or a trust deal iniquitously with one of these little ones, and I profit by it? Shall I trace my dollar to its source, and find it wet with tears and blood, and reject it? Or shall I decline to trace it, and buy my bread in innocence? Even the chief priests refused the thirty pieces of silver! Am I an accomplice? For that matter, is the Christian Church an accomplice? What does it say to the philanthropy of thieves? Priests used to take toll from the plunder of robbers, and say mass for their souls in return. Nowadays—“I cover my eyes, but I hold out my hand,” he said to himself.

Well—well! The Reverend William West, in his way, was doubtless as great a fool in asking unprofitable questions as was Lydia Eaton. That the existing order would be turned upside down by the introduction of the sense of personal responsibility there can be no doubt. Such an introduction would be the application to the complex egotism of the nineteenth century of the doctrines of a Galilean peasant, who was a communist and the Saviour of the world. It would be the setting forth in individual lives of the spirit of Jesus Christ, the most revolutionary element that could possibly be introduced into society. We are none of us ready for that.

At least William West was not ready; he had no intention of making himself ridiculous, no matter if he did ask himself unanswerable questions; he was not ready to throw away present opportunities and destroy his influence. Yet, as for Mrs. Eaton—

“Talk about martyrs!” he said to himself, as he sat there at midnight thinking of her, of her hard life, of her splendid foolishness.

“Well, there is one thing I could do for her. Why not? Good God, how selfish I am! I suppose she would think my money was clean? Yes, I could at least do that.”

This was no new thought. It had been in his mind more or less for months. He only faced it that night more strenuously.

So it came about that by and by he rose, his face set, his mouth hard. He took a key from his watch chain, and opened a little closet in the side of the chimney, and took out a box. He laid it on the table, and again sat down in his revolving chair, and stared blankly ahead of him. Then he opened it. There were some letters in it, and a picture, and a crumbling bunch of flowers that looked as though they had once been pansies; he held them in his hand, a bitter sort of amusement in his eyes. The letters he put aside, as though their touch stung him. At the photograph he looked long and intently. Then he bent the card over in his hand, and it broke across the middle. Hastily he gathered these things together and went over to his fireplace. A fire had been laid during the cold spring rains, and the logs were dry and dusty. At the touch of a match, they sputtered and broke into a little roaring flame. William West put his handful of letters and the flowers and the picture gently down in the midst of it, and then stood and watched them burn. When there was only a white film left, on which the sparks ran back, widening and dying, he went over to his desk, and with a certain strong and satisfied cheerfulness he began to write:—

As he folded the sheet of paper and thrust it into the envelope there was a whimsical look in his eyes.

“A love-letter!” he said to himself; but his face was very gentle and tender.

However, the answer to the letter was all that the most ardent lover could desire.