Eva stood clasping the child, who was too frightened to cry, and was breathing in hushed gasps, her face hidden on her aunt’s broad bosom.  Eva had caught her up at the first sight of her, and now she stood clasping her fiercely, and looking at them all as if she thought they wanted to rob her of the child.  Even when a great cheer went up from the crowd, and was echoed by another from the factory, with an accompaniment of waving bare, leather-stained arms and hands, that expression of desperate defiance instead of the joy of recovery did not leave her face, not until she saw Jim Tenny’s face working with repressed emotion and met his eyes full of the memory of old comradeship.  Then her bold heart and her pride all melted and she burst out in a great wail before them all.

“Oh, Jim!” she cried out.  “Oh, Jim, I lost you, and then I thought I’d lost her!  Oh, Jim!”

Then there was a chorus of feminine sobs, for Eva’s wild weeping had precipitated the ready sympathy of half the girls present.  The men started a cheer to cover a certain chivalrous shamefacedness which was upon them at the sight of the girl’s grief, and another cheer from the factory echoed it.  Then came another sound, the great steam-whistle of Lloyd’s; then the whistles of the other neighboring factories responded, and people began to swarm out of them, and the windows to fill with eager faces.  Jim Tenny grasped Eva’s arm with a grasp like a vise.  “Come this way,” said he, sharply.  “Come this way, Eva.”

“Oh, Jim! oh, Jim!” Eva sobbed again; but she followed him, little Ellen’s golden fleece tossing over her shoulder.

“She’s got her; she’s got her!” shouted the people.

[Illustration:  ‘She’s got her!’ Shouted the people]

Then the leather-stained hands gyrated, the cheers went up, and again the whistles blew.

Jim Tenny, with his hand on Eva’s arm, pushed his way through the crowd.

“Where you goin’, Jim?” asked the pretty girl at his elbow, but he pushed past her roughly, and did not seem to hear.  Eva’s face was all inflamed and convulsed with sobs, but she did not dream of covering it—­she was full of the holy shamelessness of grief and joy.  “Let me see her! let me see her!  Oh, the dear little thing, only look at her!  Where have you been, precious?  Are you hungry?  Oh, Nellie, she is hungry, I know!  She looks thin.  Run over to the bakery and buy her some cookies, quick!  Are you cold?  Give her this sacque.  Only look at her!  Kate, only look at her!  Are you hurt, darling?  Has anybody hurt you?  If anybody has, he shall be hung!  Oh, you darling!  Only see her, ’Liza.”

But Jim Tenny, his mouth set, his black brows scowling, his hard grasp on Eva’s arm, pushed straight through the gathering crowd until they came to Clarkson’s stables at the rear of Lloyd’s, where he kept his horse and buggy—­for he lived at a distance from his work, and drove over every morning.  He pointed to a chair which a hostler had occupied, tilted against the wall, for a morning smoke, after the horses were fed and watered, and which he had vacated to join the jubilant crowd.  “Sit down there,” he said to Eva.  Then he hailed a staring man coming out of the office.  “Here, help me in with my horse, quick!” said he.