“I was just coming down,” she said, as the door opened.

“Yes, he wants you to,” said Sibyl.  “It’s all right, mother Sheridan.  He’s forgiven me.”

Mrs. Sheridan sniffed instantly; tears appeared.  She kissed her daughter-in-law’s cheek; then, in silence, regarded the mirror afresh, wiped her eyes, and applied powder.

“And I hope Edith will be happy,” Sibyl added, inciting more applications of Mrs. Sheridan’s handkerchief and powder.

“Yes, yes,” murmured the good woman.  “We mustn’t make the worst of things.”

“Well, there was something else I had to say, and he wants you to hear it, too,” said Sibyl.  “We better go down, mother Sheridan.”

She led the way, Mrs. Sheridan following obediently, but when they came to a spot close by Bibbs’s door, Sibyl stopped.  “I want to tell you about it first,” she said, abruptly.  “It isn’t a secret, of course, in any way; it’s something the whole family has to know, and the sooner the whole family knows it the better.  It’s something it wouldn’t be right for us all not to understand, and of course father Sheridan most of all.  But I want to just kind of go over it first with you; it’ll kind of help me to see I got it all straight.  I haven’t got any reason for saying it except the good of the family, and it’s nothing to me, one way or the other, of course, except for that.  I oughtn’t to’ve behaved the way I did that night, and it seems to me if there’s anything I can do to help the family, I ought to, because it would help show I felt the right way.  Well, what I want to do is to tell this so’s to keep the family from being made a fool of.  I don’t want to see the family just made use of and twisted around her finger by somebody that’s got no more heart than so much ice, and just as sure to bring troubles in the long run as—­as Edith’s mistake is.  Well, then, this is the way it is.  I’ll just tell you how it looks to me and see if it don’t strike you the same way.”

Within the room, Bibbs, much annoyed, tapped his ear with his pencil.  He wished they wouldn’t stand talking near his door when he was trying to write.  He had just taken from his trunk the manuscript of a poem begun the preceding Sunday afternoon, and he had some ideas he wanted to fix upon paper before they maliciously seized the first opportunity to vanish, for they were but gossamer.  Bibbs was pleased with the beginnings of his poem, and if he could carry it through he meant to dare greatly with it—­he would venture it upon an editor.  For he had his plan of life now:  his day would be of manual labor and thinking —­he could think of his friend and he could think in cadences for poems, to the crashing of the strong machine—­and if his father turned him out of home and out of the Works, he would work elsewhere and live elsewhere.  His father had the right, and it mattered very little to Bibbs—­he faced the prospect of a working-man’s