Sure enough, there he was, but instead of lying face down on the grass, as he had done before, he was sitting back against a tree.  He had the air of having settled into such a long lease of despair that he had sought the most comfortable position for it.  His face was ghastly.  He looked at Ellen as she drew near, and opened his mouth as if to speak, but instead he only caught his breath.  He stared hard at her, then he closed his eyes as if not to see her, and motioned her away with one hand with an inarticulate noise in his throat.

But Ellen sat down beside him.  She caught his two hands and looked at him.  “Father, look at me,” said she, and Andrew opened his eyes.  The expression in them was dreadful, compounded of shame and despair and dread, but the girl’s met them with a sort of glad triumph and strength of love.  “Now look here, father,” she said, “you tell me all about it.  I didn’t want to know last night.  Now I want to know.  What is the matter?”

Andrew continued to look at her, then all at once he spoke with a kind of hoarse shout.  “I’m discharged!  I’m discharged,” he said, “from McGuire’s; they’ve got a boy who can move faster in my place—­a boy for less pay, who can move faster.  I hurried over to Lloyd’s to see if they would take me on again; I’ve always thought I should get back into Lloyd’s, and I saw the foreman, and he told me to my face that I was too old, that they wanted younger men.  And I went into the office to see Lloyd, pushed past the foreman, with him damning me, and I saw Lloyd.”

“Was young Mr. Lloyd there?” asked Ellen, with white lips.

“No; I guess he had gone to dinner.  And Lloyd looked at me, and I believe he counted every gray hair in my head, and he saw my back, and he saw my hands, and he said—­he said I was too old.”

Andrew snatched his hands from Ellen’s grasp, pressed them to his face, and broke into weeping.  “Oh, my God, I’m too old, I’m too old!” he sobbed; “I’m out of it!  I’m too old!”

Ellen regarded him, and her face had developed lines of strength hitherto unrevealed.  There was no pity in it, hardly love; she looked angry and powerful.  “Father, stop doing so, and look at me,” she said.  She dragged her father’s hands from his face, and he stared at her with his inflamed eyes, half terrified, half sustained.  At that moment he realized a strength of support as from his own lost youth, a strength as of eternal progress which was more to be relied upon than other human strength.  For the first time he leaned on his child, and realized with wonder the surety of the stay.

“Now, father, you stop doing so,” said Ellen.  “You can get work somewhere; you are not old.  Call yourself old!  It is nonsense.  Are you going to give in and be old because two men tell you that you are?  What if your hair is gray!  Ever so many young men have gray hair.  You are not old, and you can get work somewhere.  McGuire’s and Lloyd’s are not the only factories in the country.”