He saw Ellen going out, descending the steps with the Atkins girls, and as she passed the light, her fair head shone out for a second like an aureole.  A great wave of tenderness came over him.  He reflected that it would make no difference to her, that it was only a question of time before he lifted her forever out of the ranks of toil.  The impulse was strong upon him to go to see her that night, but he had set himself to wait three months after his aunt’s death, and the time was not yet up.  He had a feeling that he might seem to be, and possibly would be, taking advantage of his bereavement if he went sooner, and that Ellen herself might think so.

It was that very night that Ellen had gone to bed early, to prove not only to her mother but to herself that she did not expect him, and the men came to see Andrew.  Once she heard Amos Lee’s voice raised to a higher pitch than ever, and distinguished every word.

“I tell you he’s goin’ to cut the wages to-morrow,” said he.

There was a low rumble of response, which Ellen could not understand, but Lee’s answer made it evident.

“How do I know?” he thundered.  “It is in the air.  He don’t tell any more than his uncle did; but you wait and see, that’s all.”

“I don’t believe it,” the girl up-stairs said to herself, indignantly and loyally.  “He can’t cut the wages of all those poor men, he with all his uncle’s money.”

But the next morning the reduced price-list was posted on the walls of the different rooms in Lloyd’s.

Chapter XLVII

There was a driving snow-storm the next day.  When Ellen started for the factory the white twilight of early morning still lingered.  Everywhere were the sons and daughters of toil plodding laboriously and noiselessly through the snow, each keeping in the track of the one who went before.  There was no wind blowing, and the snow was in a blue-white level; the trees bent stiffly and quietly beneath a heavy shag of white, and now and then came a clamor of birds, which served to accentuate the silence and peace.  Ellen could always be forced by an extreme phase of nature to forgetfulness of her own stresses.  For the time being she forgot everything; her vain watching for Robert, the talk of trouble in the factory, the disappointment in her home—­all were forgotten in the contemplation, or rather in the absorbing, of this new-old wonder of snow.

There was a survival of the old Greek spirit in the girl, and had she come to earth without her background of orthodox traditions, she might have easily found her own deities in nature.  The peace of the snow enveloped her soul as well as the earth, and she became a beneficiary of the white storm; the graceful droop of the pine boughs extended to her thoughts, and the clamor of the birds aroused in her a winged freedom, so that she felt at once peace and a sort of ecstasy.  She walked in the track of a stolidly plodding man