every motion.  There was about the girl a mystery, not of darkness but of light, which seemed to draw him on and on and on without volition.  And yet she said nothing especially remarkable, for Ellen was only a young girl, reared in a little provincial city in common environments.  She would have been a great genius had she more than begun to glimpse the breadth and freedom of the outer world through her paling of life.  She was too young and too unquestioning of what she had learned from her early loves.

“Have you always lived here in Rowe?” asked Lloyd.

“Yes,” said she.  “I was born here, and I have lived here ever since.”

“And you have never been away?”

“Only once.  Once I went to Dragon Beach and stayed a fortnight with mother.”  She said this with a visible sense of its importance.  Dragon Beach was some ten miles from Rowe, a cheap seashore place, built up with flimsy summer cottages of factory hands.  Andrew had hired one for a fortnight once when Ellen was ailing, and it had been the event of a lifetime to the family.  They hereafter dated from the year “we went to Dragon Beach.”

Lloyd looked with a quick impulse of compassionate tenderness at this child who had been away from Rowe once to Dragon Beach.  He had his own impressions of Dragon Beach and also of Rowe.

“I suppose you enjoyed that?” said he.

“Very much.  The sea is beautiful.”

So, after all, it was the sea which she had cared for at Dragon Beach, and not the clam-bakes and merry-go-rounds and women in wrappers in the surf.  Robert felt rebuked for thinking of anything but the sea in his memory of Dragon Beach; there was a wonderful water-view there.

All the time they sat there in the parlor, the murmur of conversation at the south door continued, and now and again over it swelled the fervid exhortations of Nahum Beals.  Not a word could be distinguished, but the meaning was beyond doubt.  That voice was full of denunciation, of frenzied appeal, of warning.

“Who is it?” asked Lloyd, after an unusually loud burst.

“Mr. Beals,” replied Ellen, uneasily.  She wished that he would not talk so loud.

“He sounds as if he were preaching fire and brimstone,” said Robert.

“No, he is talking about the labor question,” replied Ellen.

Then she looked confused, for she remembered that this young man’s uncle was the head of Lloyd’s, that he himself would be the head of Lloyd’s some day.  All at once, along with another feeling which seemed about to conquer her, came a resentment against this young man with his fine clothes and his gentle manners.  Two men passed the windows and one of them looked in, and when the electric-light flashed on his face she saw Granville Joy, and the man with him was in his shirt-sleeves.  She saw those white shirt-sleeves swing into the darkness, and felt at once antagonized against herself and against Robert, and yet she knew that she had never seen a man like him.