Then Maria burst out with a pitiful emphasis.  “I’ve got to go,” she said.  “Father had a bad spell last night; he can’t get out.  He’ll lose his place this time, we are afraid, and there’s a note coming due that father says he’s paid, but the man didn’t give it up, and he’s got to pay it over again; the lawyer says there is no other way, and we can’t let John Sargent do everything.  He’s got a sister out West he’s about supporting since her husband died last fall.  I’ve got to go to work; we’ve got to have the money, Ellen, and as for my cough, I have always coughed.  It hasn’t killed me yet, and I guess it won’t yet for a while.”  Maria said the last with a reckless gayety which was unusual to her.

Abby trudged on ahead with indignant emphasis.  “I’d like to know what good it is going to do to work and earn and pay up money if everybody is going to be killed by it?” she said, without turning her head.

Ellen pulled up Maria’s coat-collar around her neck and put an extra fold of her dress-skirt into her hand.

“There, you can hold it up as high as that, it looks all right,” said she.

“I wish Robert Lloyd had to get up at six o’clock and trudge a mile in this snow to his work,” said Abby, with sudden viciousness.  “He’ll be driven down in his Russian sleigh by a man looking like a drum-major, and cut our poor little wages, and that’s all he cares.  Who’s earning the money, he or us, I’d like to know?  I hate the rich!”

“If it’s true, what you say,” said Maria, “it seems to me it’s like hating those you have given things to, and that’s worse than hating your enemies.”

“Don’t say given, say been forced to hand over,” retorted Abby, fiercely; “and don’t preach, Maria Atkins, I hate preaching; and do have sense enough not to talk when you are out in this awful storm.  You can keep your mouth shut, if you can’t do anything else!”

Ellen had turned quite white at Abby’s words.

“You don’t think that he means to cut the wages?” she said, eagerly.

“I know he does.  I had it straight.  Wait till you get to the shop.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“You wait.  Norman Lloyd was as hard as nails, and the young one is just like him.”  Abby looked relentlessly at Ellen.

“Maybe it isn’t so,” whispered Maria to Ellen.

“I don’t believe it is,” responded Ellen, but Abby heard them, and turned with a vicious jerk.

“Well, you wait!” said she.

The moment Ellen reached the factory she realized that something unwonted had happened.  There were groups of men, talking, oblivious even of the blinding storm, which was coming in the last few minutes with renewed fury, falling in heavy sheets like dank shrouds.

Ellen saw one man in a muttering group throw out an arm, whitened like a branch of a tree, and shake a rasped, red fist at the splendid Russian sleigh of the Lloyd’s, which was just gliding out of sight with a flurry of bells and a swing of fur tails, the whole surmounted by the great fur hat of the coachman.  Abby turned and looked fiercely at Ellen.