Their progress through the mill was delayed further by Rollo’s interest in the operatives.  A rather sad interest this had need to be.  The men, and the women, employed as hands in the works, were lank and pale and haggard, or dark and coarse.  Their faces were reserved and gloomy; eyes would not light up, even when spoken to; and Rollo tried the expedient pretty often.  Yet the children were the worst.  Little things, and others older, but all worn-looking, sadly pale, very hopeless, going back and forth at their work like so many parts of the inexorable machinery.  Here Rollo now and then got a smile, that gleamed out as a rare thing in that atmosphere.  On the whole, the outer air seemed strange and sweet to the two when they came out into it, and not more sweet than strange.  Where they had been, surely the beauty, and the freedom, and the promise, of the pure oxygen and the blue heaven, were all shut out and denied and forgotten.

‘There is work for somebody to do,’ said Rollo thoughtfully, when the mill door was shut behind them.

The girl looked at him gravely, then away.

‘Do all mill people look so?’ she said.  ’Or is it just Morton Hollow?’

’They do not all look so.  At least I am told this is a very uncommon case for this country.  Yet no doubt there are others, and it is not—­“just Morton Hollow.”  Suppose, for the sake of argument, that all mill people look so; what deduction would you draw?’

‘Well, that I should like to have the mills,’ said Wych Hazel.

They walked slowly on through the Hollow.  The place was still and empty; all the hands being in the mills; the buzz of machinery within, as they passed one, was almost the only sound abroad.  The cottages were forlorn looking places; set anywhere, without reference to the consideration whether space for a garden ground was to be had.  No such thing as a real garden could be seen.  No flowers bloomed anywhere; no token of life’s comfort or pleasure hung about the poor dwellings.  Poverty and dirt and barrenness; those three facts struck the visitor’s eye and heart.  A certain degree of neatness and order indeed was enforced about the road and the outside of the houses; nothing to give the feeling of the sweet reality within.  The only person they saw to speak to was a woman sitting at an open door crying.  It would not have occurred to most people that she was one ‘to speak to’; however, Rollo stepped a little out of the road to open communication with her.  His companion followed, but the words were German.

‘What is the matter?’ she asked as they turned to go on their way.

’Do you remember the girl that came to Gyda’s that day you were there? this is her mother.  Truedchen, she says, has been sick for two weeks; very ill; she has just begun to sit up; and her father has driven her to mill work again this morning.  The mother says she knows the girl will die.’

‘Driven her to work!’ said Hazel.  ‘What for?’