“Business must be a great care,” said she, and a look of utter peaceful reflection upon her own lot overspread her face.

After supper Robert went down to his aunt Cynthia’s.  He had not been there for a long time.  The minute he entered she started up with an eagerness which had been completely foreign to her of late years.

“What is the matter, Robert?” she asked, softly.  She took both his hands as she spoke, and her look in his face was full of delicate caressing.

Robert succumbed at once to this feminine solicitude, of which he had had lately so little.  He felt as if he had relapsed into childhood.  A sense of injury which was exquisite, as it brought along with it a sense of his demand upon love and sympathy, seized him.

“I am worried beyond endurance, Aunt Cynthia,” said he.

“About the strike?  I have read the night papers.”

“Yes; I tried to do what was right, even at a sacrifice to myself, and—­”

Cynthia had read about Ellen, but she was a woman, and she said nothing as to that.

“I tried to do what was right,” Robert said, fairly broken down again.

Cynthia had seated herself, and Robert had taken a low foot-stool at her side.  It came over him as he did so that it had been a favorite seat of his when a child.  As for Cynthia, influenced by the appealing to the vulnerable place of her nature, she put her slim hands on her nephew’s head, and actually seemed to feel his baby curls.

“Poor boy,” she whispered.

Robert put both his arms around her and hid his face on her shoulder, for love is a comforter, in whatever guise.

Chapter LV

On the day after the strike Ellen went to McGuire’s and to Briggs’s, the two other factories in Rowe, to see if she could obtain a position; but she was not successful.  McGuire had discharged some of his employes, reducing his force to its smallest possible limits, since he had fewer orders, and was trying in that way to avert the necessity of a cut in wages, and a strike or shut-down.  McGuire’s was essentially a union factory, as was Briggs’s.  Ellen would have found in either case difficulty about obtaining employment, because she did not belong to the union, if for no other reason.  At Briggs’s she encountered the proprietor himself in the office, and he dismissed her with a bluff, almost brutal, peremptoriness which hurt her cruelly, although she held up her head high as she left.  Briggs turned to a foreman who was standing by before she was well out of hearing.

“I like that!” he said.  “Mrs. Briggs read about that girl in the paper last night, and the strike wouldn’t have been on at Lloyd’s if it hadn’t been for her.  I would as soon take a lighted match into a powder-magazine.”

The foreman grinned.  “She’s a pretty, mild-looking thing,” he said; “doesn’t look as if she could say boo to a goose.”