“That is so,” said another man at Jim Tenny’s right.  “She is right to come out as she has done when she is so anxious for the child.”  This man was a fair-haired Swede, and he spoke English with a curious and careful precision, very different from the hurried, slurring intonations of the other men.  He had been taught the language by a philanthropic young lady, a college graduate, in whose father’s family he had lived when he first came to America, and in consequence he spoke like a gentleman and had some considerable difficulty in understanding his companions.

“Eva Loud has had a damned hard time, take it all together,” spoke out another man, looking over is bench at the girl on the street.  He was small and thin and wiry, a mass of brown-coated muscles under his loose-hanging gingham shirt.  He plied feverishly his cutting-knife with his lean, hairy hands as he spoke.  He was accounted one of the best and swiftest cutters in Lloyd’s, and he worked unceasingly, for he had an invalid wife and four children to support.  Now and then he had to stop to cough, then he worked faster.

“That’s so,” said the first man.

“Yes, that is so,” said the Swede, with a nod of his fair head.

“And now to lose this young one that she set her life by,” said the first girl, with an evident point of malice in her tone, and a covert look at the pretty girl at Jim Tenny’s side.  Jim Tenny paled under his grime; the hand which held the knife clinched.

“What do you s’pose has become of the young one?” said the first girl.  “There’s a good many out from the shop huntin’ this mornin’, ain’t there?”

“Fifty,” said the first man, laconically.

“You three were out all day yesterday, wa’n’t you?”

“Yes, Jim and Carl and me were out till after midnight.”

“Well, I wonder whether the poor little young one is alive?  Don’t seem as if she could be—­but—­”

“Look there! look there!” screamed the elderly girl suddenly.  “Look at there!” She began to dance, she laughed, she sobbed, she waved her lean hands frantically out of the window, leaning far over the bench.  “Look at there!” she kept crying.  Then she turned and ran out of the room, with the other girls and half the cutting-room after her.

“Damn it, she’s got the child!” said the thin man.  He kept on working, his dark, sinewy hands flying over the sheets of leather, but the tears ran down his cheeks.  Lloyd’s emptied itself into the street, and surrounded Eva Loud and Ellen, who, running aimlessly, had come straight to her aunt.  Jim Tenny was first.