if the fat old book-keeper had known it, he would have said that the man was better than he knew.  But then,—­poor Huff!  He passed slowly through the long alleys between the great looms.  Overhead the ceiling looked like a heavy maze of iron cylinders and black swinging bars and wheels, all in swift, ponderous motion.  It was enough to make a brain dizzy with the clanging thunder of the engines, the whizzing spindles of red and yellow, and the hot daylight glaring over all.  The looms were watched by women, most of them bold, tawdry girls of fifteen or sixteen, or lean-jawed women from the hills, wives of the coal-diggers.  There was a breathless odor of copperas.  As he went from one room to another up through the ascending stories, he had a vague sensation of being followed.  Some shadow lurked at times behind the engines, or stole after him in the dark entries.  Were there ghosts, then, in mills in broad daylight?  None but the ghosts of Want and Hunger and Crime, he might have known, that do not wait for night to walk our streets:  the ghosts that poor old Knowles hoped to lay forever.

Holmes had a room fitted up in the mill, where he slept.  He went up to it slowly, holding the paper tightly in one hand, glancing at the operatives, the work, through his furtive half-shut eye.  Nothing escaped him.  Passing the windows, he did not once look out at the prophetic dream of beauty he had left without.  In the mill he was of the mill.  Yet he went slowly, as if he shrank from the task waiting for him.  Why should he?  It was a simple matter of business, this transfer of Knowles’s share in the mill to himself; to-day he was to decide whether he would conclude the bargain.  If any dark history of wrong lay underneath, if this simple decision of his was to be the struggle for life and death with him, his cold, firm face told nothing of it.  Let us be just to him, stand by him, if we can, in the midst of his desolate home and desolate life, and look through his cold, sorrowful eyes at the deed he was going to do.  Dreary enough he looked, going through the great mill, despite the power in his quiet face.  A man who had strength to be alone; yet, I think, with all his strength and power, his mother could not have borne to look back from the dead that day, to see her boy so utterly alone.  The day was the crisis of his life, looked forward to for years; he held in his hand a sure passport to fortune.  Yet he thrust the hour off, perversely, trifling with idle fancies, pushing from him the one question which all the years past and to come had left for this day to decide.