When the night came he would light the kerosene lamp in their one room and read aloud the stories from the Sunday papers, she listening eagerly and asking him questions he could not answer, her eyes filling with tears or her face breaking into smiles.  This summed up her life.

Not much in the world, all this, for Sanders!—­not much of rest, or comfort, or happy sunshine,—­not much of song or laughter, the pipe of birds or smell of sweet blossoms,—­not much room for gratitude or courage or human kindness or charity.  Only the ceaseless engine-bell, the grime, the sulphurous hellish smoke, the driving rain, the ice and dust,—­only the endless monotony of ill-smelling, steaming carts, the smoke-stained signal-flag and greasy lantern,—­only the tottering shanty with the two beds, the stove, and the few chairs and table,—­only the blue-eyed crippled girl who wound her thin arms about his neck.

It was on Sundays in the summer that the dreary monotony ceased.  Then Sanders would carry her to the edge of the woods, a mile or more back of the cut.  There was a little hollow carpeted with violets, and a pond, where now and then a water-lily escaped the factory boys, and there were big trees and bushes and stretches of grass, ending in open lots squared all over by the sod gatherers.

On these days Sanders would lie on his back and watch the treetops swaying in the sunlight against the sky, and the girl would sit by him and make mounds of fresh mosses and pebbles, and tie the wild flowers into bunches.  Sometimes he would pretend that there were fish in the pond, and would cut a pole and bend a pin, tie on a bit of string, and sit for hours watching the cork, she laughing beside him in expectation.  Sometimes they would both go to sleep, his arm across her.  And so the summer passed.

One day in the autumn, at twelve-o’clock whistle, a crowd of young ruffians from the bolt-works near the brewery swept down the crossing chasing a homeless dog.  Sanders stood in the road with his flag.  A passing freight train stopped the mob.  The dog dashed between the wheels, doubling, and then bounding up the slope of the cut, sprang through the half-open door of the shanty.  When he saw the girl he stopped short, hesitated, looked anxiously into her face, crouched flat, and pulling himself along by his paws, laid his head at her feet.  When Sanders came home that night the dog was asleep in her lap.  He was about to drive him out until he caught the look in her face, then he stopped, and laid his empty dinner-pail on the shelf.

“I seen him a-comin’,” he said; “them rats from the bolt-factory was a-humpin’ him, too!  Guess if the freight hadn’t a-come along they’d a-ketched him.”