Abby caught sight of Ellen, pale and breathless, in the door, with her mother looking over her shoulder, and she addressed her with renewed violence.  “Come here, Ellen,” she said, “and put yourself on my side.  We’ve got to give in.”

“You go away,” cried little Amabel, in a shrill voice, looking around Ellen’s arm; but nobody paid any attention to her.

“I never will,” returned Ellen, with a great flash, but her voice trembled.

“You’ve got to,” said Abby.  “I tell you there’s no other way.”

“I’ll die before I give up,” cried Lee, in a loud, threatening voice.

“I’m with ye,” said Tom Peel.

Dixon and the young laster who sat beside him looked at each other, but said nothing.  Dixon wrinkled his forehead over his pipe.

“Then you’d better go to work quick, before some that I know of, who are enough sight better worth saving than you are, starve,” replied Abby, unshrinkingly.  “If I could I would go to Lloyd’s and open it on my own account to-morrow.  I believe in bravery, but nothing except fools and swine jump over precipices.”

Abby passed through the room, sprinkling rain-drops from her drenched skirts, and went into the kitchen with Ellen.  Fanny cast an angry glance at her, then a solicitous one at her dripping garments.

“Abby Atkins, you haven’t got any rubbers on,” said she.

“Rubbers!” repeated Abby.

“You just slip off those wet skirts, and Amabel will fetch you down Ellen’s old black petticoat and brown dress.  Amabel—­”

But Abby seated herself peremptorily before the kitchen stove and extended one soaked little foot in its shabby boot.  “I’m past thinking or caring about wet skirts,” said she.  “Good Lord, what do wet skirts matter?  We can’t make wrappers any longer.  We had to sell the sewing-machine yesterday to pay the rent or be turned out, and we haven’t got a thing to eat in the house except potatoes and a little flour.  We haven’t had any meat for a week.  Nice fare for a man like poor father and a girl like Maria!  We have come down to the kitchen fire like you, but we can’t keep it burning as late as this.  The rest went to bed an hour ago to keep warm.  Maria has got more cold.  She did seem better one spell, but now she’s worse again.  Our chamber is freezing cold, and we haven’t had a fire in it since the strike.  John Sargent has ransacked every town within twenty miles for work, but he can’t get any, and his sick sister keeps sending to him for money.  He looks as if he was just about done, too.  He went off somewhere after supper.  A great supper!  He don’t smoke a pipe nowadays.  Father don’t get the medicine he ought to have, and that cold spell he just about perished for a little whiskey.  The bedroom was like ice with no fire in the sitting-room, and he didn’t sleep warm.  It’s one awful thing after another happening.  Did you know Mamie Brady took laudanum last night?”