To-night, when Ellen passed in her strange flight, the factories were still, though they were yet blazing with light.  The gigantic buildings, after a style of architecture as simple as a child’s block house, and adapted to as primitive an end, loomed up beside the road like windowed shells enclosing massive concretenesses of golden light.  They looked entirely vacant except for light, for the workmen had all gone home, and there were only the keepers in the buildings.  There were three of them, representing three different firms, rival firms, grouped curiously close together, but Lloyd’s was much the largest.  Andrew and Eva worked in Lloyd’s.

She was near the last factory when she met a man hastening along with bent shoulders, of intent, middle-aged progress.  After he had passed her with a careless glance at the small, swift figure, she smelt coffee.  He was carrying home a pound for his breakfast supply.  That suddenly made her cry, though she did not know why.  That familiar odor of home and the wontedness of life made her isolation on her little atom of the unusual more pitiful.  The man turned round sharply when she sobbed.  “Hullo! what’s the matter, sis?” he called back, in a pleasant, hoarse voice.  Ellen did not answer; she fled as if she had wings on her feet.  The man had many children of his own, and was accustomed to their turbulence over trifles.  He kept on, thinking that there was a sulky child who had been sent on an errand against her will, that it was not late, and she was safe enough on that road.  He resumed his calculation as to whether his income would admit of a new coal-stove that winter.  He was a workman in a factory, with one accumulative interest in life—­coal-stoves.  He bought and traded and swapped coal-stoves every winter with keenest enthusiasm.  Now he had one in his mind which he had just viewed in a window with the rapture of an artist.  It had a little nickel statuette on the top, and that quite crowded Ellen out of his mind, which had but narrow accommodations.

So Ellen kept on unmolested, though her heart was beating loud with fright.  When she came into the brilliantly lighted stretch of Main Street, which was the business centre of the city, her childish mind was partly diverted from herself.  Ellen had not been down town many times of an evening, and always in hand of her hurrying father or mother.  Now she had run away and cut loose from all restrictions of time; there was an eternity for observation before her, with no call in-doors in prospect.  She stopped at the first bright shop window, and suddenly the exultation of freedom was over the child.  She tasted the sweets of rebellion and disobedience.  She had stood before that window once before of an evening, and her aunt Eva had been with her, and one of her young men friends had come up behind, and they had gone on, the child dragging backward at her aunt’s hand.  Now she could stand as long as she wished, and stare and stare, and drink in everything which