“Where are you going, Ellen?” asked her mother.

“Just down to Abby’s a minute.”

“You don’t mean to say your are goin’ out again in this snow, Ellen Brewster?  I should think you were crazy.”  When Fanny said crazy, she suddenly started and shuddered as if she had struck herself.  She thought of Eva.  Always the possibility of a like doom was in her own mind.

“It has stopped snowing, mother,” Ellen said.

“Stopped snowing!  What if it has?  The roads ain’t cleared.  You can’t get down to Abby Atkins’s without gettin’ wet up to your knees.  I should think if you got into the house after such a storm you’d have sense enough to stay in.  I’ve worried just about enough.”

Ellen took off her coat and hat and hung them up again.  “Well, I won’t go if you feel so, mother,” she said, patiently.

“It seems as if you might get along without seein’ Abby Atkins till to-morrow mornin’, when you’d seen her only an hour ago,” Fanny went on, in the high, nagging tone which she often adopted with those whom she loved the dearest.

“Yes, I can,” said Ellen.  It seemed to her that she must see somebody with whom she could talk about the trouble in the factory, but she yielded.  There was always with the girl a perfect surface docility, as that she seemed to have no resistance, but a little way down was a rock-bed of firmness.  She lighted her lamp, and took her library book and went up-stairs to bed to read.  But she could not read, and she could not sleep when she had put aside her book and extinguished her lamp.  She could think of nothing except Robert, and what he would say to the committee.  She lay awake all night thinking of it.  Ellen was a girl who was capable of the most devoted love, and the most intense dissent and indignation towards the same person.  She could love in spite of faults, and she could see faults in spite of love.  She thought of Robert Lloyd as of the one human soul whom she loved best out of the whole world, whom she put before everybody else, even her own self, and she also thought of him with a wrath which was pitiless and uncompromising, and which seemed to tear her own heart to pieces, for one cannot be wroth with love without a set-back of torture.  “If he does not give in and raise the wages, I shall hate him,” thought Ellen; and her heart stung her as if at the touch of a hot iron, and then she could have struck herself for the supposition that he would not give in.  “He must,” she told herself, with a great fervor of love.  “He must.”

But when she went down to breakfast the next morning her mother stared at her sharply.

“Ellen Brewster, what is the matter with you?” she cried.

“Nothing.  Why?”

“Nothing!  You look like a ghost.”

“I feel perfectly well,” said Ellen.  She made an effort to eat as much breakfast as usual in order that her mother should not suspect that she was troubled.  When at last she set out for the factory, in the early morning dusk, she was chilled and trembling with excitement.