“The simplest thing imaginable,” he said.  “One of the wires leading to the switch on the instrument board had worked loose—­that awful road, you know.”

“I knew it,” Mary quietly told herself, and in her mind she again saw Helen demonstrating how to quell the wildest car on earth.  Mary ought to have stopped there, but a wicked imp seemed to have taken possession of her.

“Did Helen cry, when she saw how late it was getting?”

“She did at first,” he said, looking very solemn, “but when I told her—­”

His confessions were interrupted by Hutchins, who whispered to Mary that she was wanted on the telephone.

“It’s Mr. Forbes,” he said.

Archey’s voice was ringing with excitement when he greeted Mary over the wire.

“Can you come down to the office early this morning?” he asked.

“What’s the matter?”

“I just found out that the rest of the men had a meeting last night—­and they voted to strike.  There won’t be a man on the place this morning ... and I think there may be trouble....”

CHAPTER XXVI

Afterwards, when Mary looked back at the leading incidents of the big strike it wasn’t the epic note which interested her the most, although the contest had for her its moments of exaltation.

Nor did her thoughts revert the oftenest to those strange things which might have engrossed the chance observer—­work and happiness walking hand in hand, for instance, to the accompaniment of Mrs. Kelly’s drum—­or woman showing that she can acquire the same dexterity on a drilling machine as on a sewing machine, the same skill at a tempering oven as at a cook stove, the same competence and neatness in a factory as in a house.

Indeed, when all is said and done, the sound of the work which women were presently doing at New Bethel was only an echo of the tasks which women had done during four years of war, and being a repetition of history, it didn’t surprise Mary when she stopped to think it over.  But looking back at the whole experience later, these were the two reflections which interested her the most.

“They have always called woman a riddle,” she thought.  “I wonder if that is because she could never be natural.  If woman has been a riddle in the past, I wonder if this is the answer now....”

That was her first reflection.

Her second was this, and in it she unconsciously worded one of the great lessons of life.  “The things I worried about seldom happened.  It was something which nobody ever dreamed of—­that nearly ended everything.”

And when she thought of that, her breath would come a little quicker and soon she would shake her head, and try to put her mind on something else; although if you had been there I think you would have seen a suspicious moisture in her eye, and if she were in her room at home, she would go to a photograph on the wall-the picture of a gravely smiling girl on a convent portico—­signed “With all my love, Rosa.”