“Good land!” said Fanny.

“Yes, she did.  Ed Flynn has been playing fast and loose with her for a long time, and she’s none too well balanced, and when it came to her not having enough to eat, and to keep her warm, and her mother nagging at her all the time—­you know what an awful hard woman her mother is—­she got desperate.  She gulped it down when the last car went past and Ed Flynn hadn’t come; she had been watchin’ out for him; then she told her mother, and her mother shook her, then run for Dr. Fox, and he called in Dr. Lord, and they worked with a stomach-pump till morning, and she isn’t out of danger yet.  Then that isn’t all.  Willy Jones’s mother is failing.  He was over to our house last evening, telling us about it, and he fairly cried, poor boy.  He said he actually could not get her what she needed to make her comfortable this awful winter.  It was all he could do with odd jobs to keep the roof over their heads, that she hadn’t actually enough to eat and keep her warm.  It seemed as if he would die when he told about it.  And that isn’t all.  Those little Blake children next door are fairly starving.  They are going around to the neighbors’ swill-buckets—­it’s a fact—­just like little hungry dogs, and it’s precious little they find in them.  Mrs. Wetherhed has let her sewing-machine go, and Edward Morse is going to be sold out for taxes.  And that isn’t all.”  Abby lowered her voice a little.  She cast an apprehensive glance at the door of the other room, and at Amabel.  “Mamie Bemis has gone to the bad.  I had it straight.  She’s in Boston.  She didn’t have enough to pay for her board, and got desperate.  I know her sister did wrong, but that was no reason why she should have, and I don’t believe she would if it hadn’t been for the strike.  It’s all on account of the strike.  There’s no use talking:  before the sparrow flies in the eyes of the tiger, he’d better count the cost.”

Fanny, quite white, stood staring from Abby to Ellen, and back again.

Amabel was holding fast to a fold of Ellen’s skirt.  Ellen looked rigid.

“I knew it all before,” she said, in a low voice.

Suddenly Abby jumped up and caught the other girl in a fierce embrace.  “Ellen,” she sobbed—­“Ellen, isn’t there any way out of it?  I can’t see—­”

Ellen freed herself from Abby with a curious imperative yet gentle motion, then she opened the door into the other room again.  The loud clash of voices hushed, and every man faced towards her standing on the threshold, with her mother and Abby and little Amabel in the background.  “I want to say to you all,” said Ellen, in a clear voice, “that I think I did wrong.  I have been wondering if I had not for some time, and growing more and more certain.  I did not count the cost.  All I thought of was the principle, but the cost is a part of the principle in this world, and it has to be counted in with it.  I see now.  I don’t think the strike ought ever to have been.  It has brought about too much