Even in the cold and quiet of the woman walking by her side the homely power of the poor huckster was not weak to warm or to strengthen.  Margaret left her, turning into the crowded street leading to the part of the town where the factories lay.  The throng of anxious-faced men and women jostled and pushed, but she passed through them with a different heart from yesterday’s.  Somehow, the morbid fancies were gone; she was keenly alive; the homely real life of this huckster had fired her, touched her blood with a more vital stimulus than any tale of crusader.  As she went down the crooked maze of dingy lanes, she could hear Lois’s little cracked bell far off:  it sounded like a Christmas song to her.  She half smiled, remembering how sometimes in her distempered brain the world had seemed a gray, dismal Dance of Death.  How actual it was to-day,—­hearty, vigorous, alive with honest work and tears and pleasure!  A broad, good world to live and work in, to suffer or die, if God so willed it,—­God, the good!  She entered the vast, dingy factory; the woollen dust, the clammy air of copperas were easier to breathe in; the cramped, sordid office, the work, mere trifles to laugh at; and she bent over the ledger with its hard lines in earnest good-will, through the slow creeping hours of the long day.  She noticed that the unfortunate chicken was making its heart glad over a piece of fresh earth covered with damp moss.  Dr. Knowles stopped to look at it when he came, passing her with a surly nod.

“So your master’s not forgotten you,” he snarled, while the blind old hen cocked her one eye up at him.

Pike, the manager, had brought in some bills.

“Who’s its master?” he said, curiously, stopping by the door.

“Holmes,—­he feeds it every morning.”

The Doctor drawled out the words with a covert sneer, watching the quiet, cold face bending over the desk, meantime.

Pike laughed.

“Bah! it’s the first thing he ever fed, then, besides himself.  Chickens must lie nearer his heart than men.”

Knowles scowled at him; he had no fancy for Pike’s scurrilous gossip.

The quiet face was unmoved.  When he heard the manager’s foot on the ladder without, he tested it again.  He had a vague suspicion which he was determined to verify.

“Holmes,” he said, carelessly, “has an affinity for animals.  No wonder.  Adam must have been some such man as he, when the Lord gave him ‘dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air.’”

The hand paused courteously a moment, then resumed its quick, cool movement over the page.  He was not baffled.

“If there were such a reality as mastership, that man was born to rule.  Pike will find him harder to cheat than me, when he takes possession here.”

She looked up now, attentive.

“He came here to take my place in the mills,—­buy me out,—­articles will be signed in a day or two.  I know what you think,—­no,—­not worth a dollar.  Only brains and a soul, and he’s sold them at a high figure,—­threw his heart in,—­the purchaser being a lady.  It was light, I fancy,—­starved out, long ago.”