“Did, but I had what was mighty nigh a sunstroke last summer; had to quit.  It was damned hot up there under the roof.  It’s the same old factory his father had.”

“Goin’ to work again?”

“Next week, if I’m able, but I dun’no’ whether I can stay there longer than till spring.  It’s damned hot up there under the roof.”

The man who spoke had a leaden hue of face, something ghastly, as if the deadly heat had begun a work of decomposition.  Andrew looked at him, and his hatred against the rich man who had built himself a stately mansion, and kept his fellow-creatures at work for him in an unhealthy factory in tropical heat, and had condemned him for being too old, was redoubled.

“Andrew Brewster, where have you been?” Fanny asked, when he got home.

“I’ve been to Leavitt,” answered Andrew, shortly.

“To see if you could get a job there?”

“Yes.”

Fanny did not ask if he had been successful.  She sighed, and took another stitch in the wrapper which she was making.  That sigh almost drove Andrew mad.

“I don’t see what has got you into such a habit of sighing,” he said, brutally.

Fanny looked at him with reproachful anger.  “Andrew Brewster, you ain’t like yourself,” said she.

“I can’t help it.”

“There’s no need for you to pitch into me because you can’t get work; I ain’t to blame.  I’m doing all I can.  I won’t stand it, and you might as well know it first as last.”

Fanny glared angrily at her husband, then the tears sprang to her eyes.

Andrew hesitated a moment, then he leaned over her and put his thin cheek against her rough black hair.  “The Lord knows I don’t mean to be harsh to you, you poor girl,” said he, “but I wish I was dead.”

Fanny seemed to spring into resistance like a wire.  “Then you are a coward, Andrew Brewster,” said she, hotly.  “Talk about wishin’ you was dead.  I ’ain’t got time to die.  You’d ’nough sight better go out into the yard and split up some of that wood.”

“I didn’t mean to speak so, Fanny,” said Andrew, “but sometimes I get desperate, and I’ve been thinking of Ellen.”

“Don’t you suppose I have?” asked Fanny, angrily.

“Well, there’s one thing about it; we won’t stand in her way,” said Andrew.

“No, we won’t,” replied Fanny.  “I’ll go out washing first.”

“She hasn’t said anything?”

“No.”

As time went on Ellen still said nothing.  She had made a curious compact for a young girl with her lover.  She had stipulated that no engagement was to exist, that she should be perfectly free—­when she said that she thought of Maud Hemingway, but she said it without a tremor—­and if years hence both were free and of the same mind they might talk of it again.

Robert had rebelled strenuously.  “You know this will shut me off from seeing much of you,” he said.  “You know I told you how it will be about my even talking much to you in the factory.”