“About the cut in wages?”

Abby turned on her with sudden fire.  “Oh, my God, what can they do, Ellen Brewster?” she demanded.  “Haven’t they got to live?  Hasn’t Lloyd got it all his own way?  How are men to live in weather like this without work?  Bread without butter is better than none at all, and life at any cost is better than death for them you love.  What can they do?”

“It seems to me there is only one thing to do,” replied Ellen.

Abby stared at her wonderingly.  “You don’t mean—­” she said, as they climbed up the stairs.

“I mean I would do anything, at whatever cost to myself, to defeat injustice,” said Ellen, in a loud, clear voice.

Several men turned and looked back at her and laughed bitterly.

“It’s easy talking,” said one to another.

“That’s so,” returned the other.

The people all settled to their work as usual.  One of the foremen (Dennison), who was anxious to curry favor with his employer, reported to him in an undertone in the office that everything was quiet.  Robert nodded easily.  He had not anticipated anything else.  In the course of the morning he looked into the room where Ellen was employed, and saw with relief and concern her fair head before her machine.  It seemed to him that he could not bear it one instant longer to have her working in this fashion, that he must lift her out of it.  He still tingled with his rebuff of the night before, but he had never loved her so well, for the idea that the cut in wages affected her relation to him never occurred to him.  As he walked through the room none of the workers seemed to notice him, but worked with renewed energy.  He might have been invisible for all the attention he seemed to excite.  He looked with covert tenderness at the back of Ellen’s head, and passed on.  He reflected that he had adopted the measure of wage-cutting with no difficulty whatever.

“All it needs is a little firmness,” he thought, with a boyish complacency in his own methods.  “Now I can keep on with the factory, and no turning the poor people adrift in midwinter.”

At noon Robert put on his fur-lined coat and left the factory, springing into the sleigh, which had drawn up before the door with a flurry of bells.  He had an errand in the next town that afternoon, and was not going to return.  When the sleigh had slid swiftly out of sight through the storm, which was lightening a little, the people in the office turned to one another with a curious expression of liberty, but even then little was said.  Nellie Stone was at the desk eating her luncheon; Ed Flynn and Dennison and one of the lasters, who had looked in and then stepped in when he saw Lloyd was gone, were there.  The laster, who was young and coarsely handsome, had an admiration for the pretty girl at the desk.  Presently she addressed him, with her mouth full of apple-pie.

“Say, George, what are you fellows going to do?” she asked.