“I think he had better take one of the heel-shaving machines below,” said Flynn, “and let that big Swede, that’s as strong as an ox, and never jumped at anything in his life, take his place here.”

“All right,” said Lloyd, assuming a nonchalant air.  “Make the change if you think it advisable, Flynn.”

While such benevolence towards a possible rival had its suspicious points, yet there was, after all, some reason for it.  Granville Joy, who was delicately organized as to his nerves, was running a machine for cutting linings, and this came down with sharp thuds which shook the factory, and it was fairly torture to him.  Every time the knife fell he cringed as if at a cannon report.  He had never grown accustomed to it.  His face had acquired a fixed expression of being screwed to meet a shock of sound.  He was manifestly unfit for his job, but he received the order to leave with dismay.

“Hasn’t my work been satisfactory?” he asked Flynn.

“Satisfactory enough,” replied the foreman, genially, “but it’s too hard for you, man.”

“I ’ain’t complained,” said Joy, with a flash of his eyes.  He thought he knew why this solicitude was shown him.

“I know you ’ain’t,” said Flynn, “but you ’ain’t got the muscle and nerve for it.  That’s plain enough to see.”

“I ’ain’t complained, and I’d rather stay where I be,” said Joy, angrily.

“You’ll go where you are sent in this factory, or be damned,” cried Flynn, walking off.

Joy looked after him with an expression which transformed his face.  But the next morning the stolid Swede, who would not have started at a bomb, was at his place, and he was below, where he could not see Ellen.

Robert never spoke to Ellen in the factory, and had never called upon her since she entered.  Now and then he met her on the street and raised his hat, that was all.  Still, he began to wonder more and more if his aunt had not been mistaken in her view of the girl’s motive for giving up college and going to work.  Then, later on, he learned from Lyman Risley that a small mortgage had been put on the Brewster house some time before.  In fact, Andrew, not knowing to whom to go, and remembering his kindness when Ellen was a child, had applied to him for advice concerning it.  “He had to do it to keep his wife’s sister in the asylum,” he told Robert; “and that poor girl went to work because she was forced into it, not because she preferred it, you may be sure of that.”

The two men were walking down the street one wind-swept day in December, when the pavement showed ridges of dust as from a mighty broom, and travellers walked bending before it with backward-flying garments.

“You may be right,” said Robert; “still, as Aunt Cynthia says, so many girls have that idea of earning money instead of going to school.”