“Neither,” she said, quietly brushing her shawl.  “The work is well done, I know.”

The old man’s eye glittered for an instant, satisfied; then he turned to the books.  He thought she had gone, but, hearing a slight clicking sound, turned round.  She was taking the chicken out of the cage.

“Let it alone!” he broke out, sharply.  “Where are you going with it?”

“Home,” she said, with a queer, quizzical face.  “Let it smell the green fields, Doctor.  Ledgers and copperas are not good food for a chicken’s soul, or body either.”

“Let it alone!” he growled.  “You take it for a type of yourself, eh?  It has another work to do than to grow fat and sleep about the barnyard.”

She opened the cage.

“I think I will take it.”

“No,” he said, quietly.  “It has a master here.  Not P. Teagarden.  Why, Margaret,” pushing his stubby finger between the tin bars, “do you think the God you believe in would have sent it here without a work to do?”

She looked up; there was a curious tremor in his flabby face, a shadow in his rough voice.

“If it dies here, its life won’t have been lost.  Nothing is lost.  Let it alone.”

“Not lost?” she said, slowly, refastening the cage.  “Only I think”——­

“What, child?”

She glanced furtively at him.

“It’s a hard, scraping world where such a thing as that has work to do!”

He vouchsafed no answer.  She waited to see his lip curl bitterly, and then, amused, went down the stairs.  She had paid him for his sneer.

The steps were but a long ladder set in the wall, not the great staircase used by the hands:  that was on the other side of the factory.  It was a huge, unwieldy building, such as crowd the suburbs of trading towns.  This one went round the four sides of a square, with the yard for the vats in the middle.  The ladders and passages she passed down were on the inside, narrow and dimly lighted:  she had to grope her way sometimes.  The floors shook constantly with the incessant thud of the great looms that filled each story, like heavy, monotonous thunder.  It deafened her, made her dizzy, as she went down slowly.  It was no short walk to reach the lower hall, but she was down at last.  Doors opened from it into the ground-floor ware-rooms; glancing in, she saw vast, dingy recesses of boxes piled up to the dark ceilings.  There was a crowd of porters and draymen cracking their whips, and lounging on the trucks by the door, waiting for loads, talking politics, and smoking.  The smell of tobacco, copperas, and burning logwood was heavy to clamminess here.  She stopped, uncertain.  One of the porters, a short, sickly man, who stood aloof from the rest, pushed open a door for her with his staff.  Margaret had a quick memory for faces; she thought she had seen this one before, as she passed,—­a dark face, sullen, heavy-lipped, the hair cut convict-fashion, close to the head.  She thought, too, one of the