“Good place for it,” Bibbs murmured, still red.

Sheridan gave him a grin.  “Perhaps pretty soon you’ll be gettin’ up early enough to find things before I do!”

It was a threat, and Bibbs repeated the substance of it, later in the evening, to Mary Vertrees—­they had come to know each other that well.

“My time’s here at last,” he said, as they sat together in the melancholy gas-light of the room which had been denuded of its piano.  That removal had left an emptiness so distressing to Mr. and Mrs. Vertrees that neither of them had crossed the threshold since the dark day; but the gas-light, though from a single jet, shed no melancholy upon Bibbs, nor could any room seem bare that knew the glowing presence of Mary.  He spoke lightly, not sadly.

“Yes, it’s come.  I’ve shirked and put off, but I can’t shirk and put off any longer.  It’s really my part to go to him—­at least it would save my face.  He means what he says, and the time’s come to serve my sentence.  Hard labor for life, I think.”

Mary shook her head.  “I don’t think so.  He’s too kind.”

“You think my father’s kind?” And Bibbs stared at her.

“Yes.  I’m sure of it.  I’ve felt that he has a great, brave heart.  It’s only that he has to be kind in his own way—­because he can’t understand any other way.”

“Ah yes,” said Bibbs.  “If that’s what you mean by ’kind’!”

She looked at him gravely, earnest concern in her friendly eyes.  “It’s going to be pretty hard for you, isn’t it?”

“Oh—­self-pity!” he returned, smiling.  “This has been just the last flicker of revolt.  Nobody minds work if he likes the kind of work.  There’d be no loafers in the world if each man found the thing that he could do best; but the only work I happen to want to do is useless —­so I have to give it up.  To-morrow I’ll be a day-laborer.”

“What is it like—­exactly?”

“I get up at six,” he said.  “I have a lunch-basket to carry with me, which is aristocratic and no advantage.  The other workmen have tin buckets, and tin buckets are better.  I leave the house at six-thirty, and I’m at work in my overalls at seven.  I have an hour off at noon, and work again from one till five.”

“But the work itself?”

“It wasn’t muscularly exhausting—­not at all.  They couldn’t give me a heavier job because I wasn’t good enough.”

“But what will you do?  I want to know.”

“When I left,” said Bibbs, “I was ‘on’ what they call over there a ‘clipping-machine,’ in one of the ‘by-products’ departments, and that’s what I’ll be sent back to.”

“But what is it?” she insisted.

Bibbs explained.  “It’s very simple and very easy.  I feed long strips of zinc into a pair of steel jaws, and the jaws bite the zinc into little circles.  All I have to do is to see that the strip goes into the jaws at a certain angle—­and yet I was a very bad hand at it.”