P.S.  They’ve got a shop in New York.  I forgot to tell you that—­a huge shop.  It’s never mentioned here, but Petro told me.  He’s not ashamed, but rather proud of the way the money came.  Rags wants him and Ena to take us to the place.

What Ena did say to Peter was, “Poor little Eileen is falling in love with you.”  Peter didn’t believe it.  But it put a strange idea into his head.

CHAPTER XIII

ONE MAN AND ANOTHER

“No. 2884 Child, W. Pay Envelope.  Details under flap,” Winifred read on the neat, pale-brown packet put into her hand the night when she had served Peter Rolls for a week—­or was it five hundred weeks?  “READ THE OTHER SIDE” was printed in capital letters of white upon a black background on the flap which must be torn open to get at the contents and “details.”  The latter consisted of “Deductions, Absent, Late Fines, Keys, Mdse., Stamps, Beneficial Ass., and Sub.  Slips.”

But Win had been neither absent nor late.  Being an extra hand only, and liable to be “dispensed with” at the end of the holidays, she had not needed to subscribe her hard-earned pennies to Beneficial Assurance, that huge fund made up of weekly coppers, whose interest was to Peter Rolls almost what “Peter’s Pence” are to the Pope.  Thanks to her good health and good behaviour, “Cash Enclosed” (as secretly mentioned under the flap) was practically intact.  But it had been a nightmare week which seemed longer than all the past weeks of her life added together and if she had earned a hundred dollars instead of six she would not have felt too highly paid.

She moved wearily away from the office window, obeying the directions to “read other side,” and as she walked down the long corridor (her sore feet causing her to limp slightly) the words “if sick or disabled, notify employment bureau at once” sang through her head, keeping time with her uneven steps.

She was “reading the other side,” the other side of life which appeared to her as separate from the side she had known as the bright was separate from the dark side of the moon; the side about which people seldom troubled and never saw.  A few weeks ago, before that “wild spirit” of hers lured her half across the world to find independence, she would have thought, feeling as she felt to-night, that she was both sick and disabled.  But now she knew that hundreds of other girls under this very roof felt just as she felt, and that they took it for granted as a normal condition of life.  They hardly pitied themselves, and she must be as stoical.  If once she lost courage, she might do the thing she had boasted to Peter Rolls, Jr., that she would never do—­cry.

She thought to find a tonic effect from the sight of money earned, and in taking out her six dollars, she let fall a slip of white paper from the pay envelope.  It fluttered away, to alight on the floor, and Win’s heart beat as she picked it up.