“Sit down and I’ll make you a cup of tea.  Then maybe you’ll feel like talking about it.”

“I don’t want any tea.  Do you know that that man Akers has married Lily Cardew?”

“Married her!”

“The devil out of hell that he is.”  Ellen’s voice was terrible.  “And all the time knowing that you—­ She’s at home, the poor child, and Mademoiselle just sat and cried when she told me.  It’s a secret,” she added, fiercely.  “You keep your mouth shut about it.  She never lived with him.  She left him right off.  I wouldn’t know it now but the servants were talking about the house being forbidden to him, and I went straight to Mademoiselle.  I said:  ’You keep him away from Miss Lily, because I know something about him.’  It was when I told her that she said they were married.”

She went out and up the stairs, moving slowly and heavily.  Edith sat still, the pan on her knee, and thought.  Did Willy know?  Was that why he was willing to marry her?  She was swept with bitter jealousy, and added to that came suspicion.  Something very near the truth flashed into her mind and stayed there.  In her bitterness she saw Willy telling Lily of Akers and herself, and taking her away, or having her taken.  It must have been something like that, or why had she left him?

But her anger slowly subsided; in the end she began to feel that the new situation rendered her own position more secure, even justified her own approaching marriage.  Since Lily was gone, why should she not marry Willy Cameron?  If what Ellen had said was true she knew him well enough to know that he would deliberately strangle his love for Lily.  If it were true, and if he knew it.

She moved about the kitchen, making up the fire, working automatically in that methodless way that always set Ellen’s teeth on edge, and thinking.  But subconsciously she was listening, too.  She had heard Dan go into his mother’s room and close the door.  She was bracing herself against his coming down.

Dan was difficult those days, irritable and exacting.  Moody, too, and much away from home.  He hated idleness at its best, and the strike was idleness at its worst.  Behind the movement toward the general strike, too, he felt there was some hidden and sinister influence at work, an influence that was determined to turn what had commenced as a labor movement into a class uprising.

That very afternoon, for the first time, he had heard whispered the phrase:  “when the town goes dark.”  There was a diabolical suggestion in it that sent him home with his fists clenched.

He did not go to his mother’s room at once.  Instead, he drew a chair to his window and sat there staring out on the little street.  When the town went dark, what about all the little streets like this one?

After an hour or so of ominous quiet Edith heard him go into his mother’s room.  Her hands trembled as she closed her door.