“It’s just hand to mouth all the time,” he would grumble.  “A fellow working for the Cardews never gets ahead.  What chance has he got, anyhow?  It takes all he can get to live.”

Willy Cameron began to see that the trouble was not with Dan, but with his women folks.  And Dan was one of thousands.  His wages went for food, too much food, food spoiled in cooking.  There were men, with able women behind them, making less than Dan and saving money.

“Keep some of it out and bank it,” he suggested, but Dan sneered.

“And have a store bill a mile long!  You know mother as well as I do.  She means well, but she’s a fool with money.”

He counted his hours from the time he entered the mill until he left it, but he revealed once that there were long idle periods when the heating was going on, when he and the other men of the furnace crew sat and waited, doing nothing.

“But I’m there, all right,” he said.  “I’m not playing golf or riding in my automobile.  I’m on the job.”

“Well,” said Willy Cameron, “I’m on the job about eleven hours a day, and I wear out more shoe leather than trouser seats at that.  But it doesn’t seem to hurt me.”

“It’s a question of principle,” said Dan doggedly.  “I’ve got no personal kick, y’understand.  Only I’m not getting anywhere, and something’s got to be done about it.”

So, on the evening of the day after Lily had made her declaration of independence, Willy Cameron made his way rather heavily toward the Boyd house.  He was very tired.  He had made one or two speeches for Hendricks already, before local ward organizations, and he was working hard at his night class in metallurgy.  He had had a letter from his mother, too, and he thought he read homesickness between the lines.  He was not at all sure where his duty lay, yet to quit now, to leave Mr. Hendricks and the Boyds flat, seemed impossible.

He had tried to see Lily, too, and failed.  She had been very gentle over the telephone, but, attuned as he was to every inflection of her voice, he had thought there was unhappiness in it.  Almost despair.  But she had pleaded a week of engagements.

“I’m sorry,” she had said.  “I’ll call you up next week some time I have a lot of things I want to talk over with you.”

But he knew she was avoiding him.

And he knew that he ought to see her.  Through Mr. Hendricks he had learned something more about Jim Doyle, the real Doyle and not the poseur, and he felt she should know the nature of the accusations against him.  Lily mixed up with a band of traitors, Lily of the white flame of patriotism, was unthinkable.  She must not go to the house on Cardew Way.  A man’s loyalty was like a woman’s virtue; it could not be questionable.  There was no middle ground.

He heard voices as he entered the house, and to his amazement found Ellen in the parlor.  She was sitting very stiff on the edge of her chair, her hat slightly crooked and a suit-case and brown paper bundle at her feet.