It was an hour beyond the normal quitting time on the day of ultimatums and counter-threatenings, the small office force had gone home, and the night squad of deputies had come to relieve the day guard. Griswold closed the spare desk in the manager's room and twirled his chair to face Raymer.

"We may as well go and get something to eat," he suggested. "There will be nothing doing to-night."

Raymer began to put his desk in order.

"No, not to-night. The trouble will begin when we try to start up with a new force. Call it a weakness if you like, but I dread it, Kenneth."

Griswold's smile was a mere baring of the teeth. "That's all right, Ned; you do the dreading and I'll do the fighting," he said; adding: "What we've had to-day has merely whetted my appetite."

The man of peace shook his head dejectedly.

"I can't understand it," he protested. "Up to last night I was calling you a benevolent Socialist, and my only fear was that you might some time want to reorganize things and turn the plant into a little section of Utopia. Now you are out-heroding Herod on the other side."

Griswold got up and crushed his soft hat upon his head.

"Only fools and dead folk are denied the privilege of changing their minds," he returned. "Let's go up to the Winnebago and feed."

The dinner to which they sat down a little later was a small feast of silence. Each was busy with his own thoughts, and it was not until after the coffee had been served that Griswold leaned across the table to call Raymer's attention to a man who was finishing his meal in a distant corner of the dining-room, a swarthy-faced man who drank his coffee with the meat course to the unpleasant detriment of a pair of long drooping mustaches.

"Wait a minute before you look around, and then tell me who that fellow is over on the right—the man with the black mustaches," he directed.

Raymer looked and shook his head.

"He's a new-comer—comparatively; somebody at the club said he gave himself out for a lumberman from Louisiana."

Griswold was nodding slowly. "His name?" he asked.

"I can't remember. It's an odd name; Boffin, or Giffin, or something like that. They're beginning to say now that he isn't a lumberman at all—just why, I don't know."

Griswold's right hand stole softly to his hip pocket. The touch was reassuring. But a little while after, when he was leaving the dining-room with Raymer, he dropped behind and made a quick transfer of something from the hip pocket to the side pocket of his coat. His hand was still in the coat pocket when he parted from the young iron-founder on the sidewalk.

"You'll be going home, I suppose?" he said.

Raymer made a wry face.

"Yes; and I wish to gracious you were the one who had to face my mother and sister. They're all for peace, you know—peace at any old price."

Griswold laughed.

"Tell them we're going to have peace if we are obliged to fight for it. And don't let them swing you. If we back down now we may as well go into court and ask for a receiver. Good-night."

Though he had not betrayed it, Griswold was fiercely impatient to get away. One tremendous question had been dominating all others from the earliest moment of the morning awakening, and all day long it had fed upon doubtings and uncertainty. Would Andrew Galbraith recover from the effects of the drowning accident? At first, he thought he would go to his room and telephone to Margery. But before he had reached the foot of Shawnee Street he had changed his mind. What he wanted to say could scarcely be trusted to the wires.

Twice before he reached the gate of the Grierson lawn he fancied he was followed, and twice he stepped behind the nearest shade-tree and tightened his grip upon the thing in his right-hand pocket. But both times the rearward sidewalk showed itself empty. Since false alarms may have, for the moment, all the shock of the real, he found that his hands were trembling when he came to unlatch the Grierson gate, and it made him vindictively self-scornful. Also, it gave him a momentary glimpse into another and hitherto unmeasured depth in the valley of stumblings. In the passing of the glimpse he was made to realize that it is the coward who kills; and kills because he is a coward.

He had traversed the stone-flagged approach and climbed the steps of the broad veranda to reach for the bell-push when he heard his name called softly in the voice that he had come to know in all of its many modulations. The call came from the depths of one of the great wicker lounging-chairs half-hidden in the veranda shadows. In a moment he had placed another of the chairs for himself, dropping into it wearily.

"How did you know it was I?" he asked, when he could trust himself to speak.

"I saw you at the gate," she returned. "Are you just up from the Iron Works?"

"I have been to dinner since we came up-town—Raymer and I."

A pause, and then: "The men are still holding out?"

"We are holding out. The plant is closed, and it will stay closed until we can get another force of workmen."

"There will be lots of suffering," she ventured.

"Inevitably. But they have brought it upon themselves."

"Not the ones who will suffer the most—the women and children," she corrected.

"It's no use," he said, answering her thought. "There is nothing in me to appeal to."

"There was yesterday, or the day before," she suggested.

"Perhaps. But yesterday was yesterday, and to-day is to-day. As I told Raymer a little while ago, I've changed my mind."

"About the rights of the down-trodden?"

"About all things under the sun."

"No," she denied, "you only think you have. But you didn't come here to tell me that?"

"No; I came to ask a single question. How is Mr. Galbraith?"

"He is a very sick man."

Another pause, for which the questioner was responsible.

"You mean that there is a chance that he may not recover?"

"More than a chance, I'm afraid. The first thing Doctor Bertie did yesterday evening was to wire St. Paul for two trained nurses; and to-day he telegraphed Chicago for Doctor Holworthy, who charges twenty-five dollars a minute for mere office consultations."

"Humph!" said Griswold, "money needn't cut any figure." And then, after a moment of silence: "I did my best; you know I did my best?"

Her answer puzzled him a little.

"I could almost find it in my heart to hate you if you hadn't."

"But you know I did."

"Yes; I know you did."

Silence again, broken only by the whispering of the summer night breeze rustling the leaves of the lawn oaks and the lapping of tiny waves on the lake beach. At the end of it, Griswold got up and groped for his hat.

"I'm going home," he said. "It has been a pretty strenuous day, and there is another one coming. But before I go I want you to promise me one thing. Will you let me know immediately, by 'phone or messenger, if Mr. Galbraith takes a turn for the better?"

"Certainly," she said; and she let him say good-night and get as far as the steps before she called him back.

"There was another thing," she began, with the sober gravity that he could never be sure was not one of her many poses, and not the least alluring one. "Do you believe in God, Kenneth?"

The query took him altogether by surprise, but he made shift to answer it with becoming seriousness.

"I suppose I do. Why?"

"It is a time to pray to Him," she said softly; "to pray very earnestly that Mr. Galbraith's life may be spared."

He could not let that stand.

"Why should I concern myself, specially?" he asked; adding: "Of course, I'm sorry, and all that, but——"

"Never mind," she interposed, and she left her chair to walk beside him to the steps. "I've had a hard day, too, Kenneth, boy, and I—I guess it has got on my nerves. But, all the same, you ought to do it, you know."

He stopped and looked down into the eyes whose depths he could never wholly fathom.

"Why don't you do it?" he demanded.

"I? oh, God doesn't know me; and, besides, I thought—oh, well, it doesn't matter what I thought. Good-night."

And before he could return the leave-taking word, she was gone.