to divide forever the world of yesterday from that of to-morrow.  With a movement suggestive of tenderness she was picking up Ditmar’s pen to set it in the glass rack when her ear caught the sound of voices, and she stood transfixed, listening intently.  There were footsteps in the corridor, the voices came nearer; one, loud and angered, she detected above the others.  It was Ditmar’s!  Nothing had happened to him!  Dropping the pen, she went over to the window, staring out over the grey waters, trembling so violently that she could scarcely stand.

She did not look around when they entered the room Ditmar, Caldwell, Orcutt, and evidently a few watchmen and overseers.  Some one turned on the electric switch, darkening the scene without.  Ditmar continued to speak in vehement tones of uncontrolled rage.

“Why in hell weren’t those gates bolted tight?” he demanded.  “That’s what I want to know!  There was plenty of time after they turned the corner of East Street.  You might have guessed what they would do.  But instead of that you let ’em into the mill to shut off the power and intimidate our own people.”  He called the strikers an unprintable name, and though Janet stood, with her back turned, directly before him, he gave no sign of being aware of her presence.

“It wasn’t the gatekeeper’s fault,” she heard Orcutt reply in a tone quivering with excitement and apprehension.  “They really didn’t give us a chance—­that’s the truth.  They were down Canal Street and over the bridge before we knew it.”

“It’s just as I’ve said a hundred times,” Ditmar retorted.  “I can’t afford to leave this mill a minute, I can’t trust anybody—­” and he broke out in another tirade against the intruders.  “By God, I’ll fix ’em for this—­I’ll crush ’em.  And if any operatives try to walkout here I’ll see that they starve before they get back—­after all I’ve done for ’em, kept the mill going in slack times just to give ’em work.  If they desert me now, when I’ve got this Bradlaugh order on my hands—­” Speech became an inadequate expression of his feelings, and suddenly his eye fell on Janet.  She had turned, but her look made no impression on him.  “Call up the Chief of Police,” he said.

Automatically she obeyed, getting the connection and handing him the receiver, standing by while he denounced the incompetence of the department for permitting the mob to gather in East Street and demanded deputies.  The veins of his forehead were swollen as he cut short the explanations of the official and asked for the City Hall.  In making an appointment with the Mayor he reflected on the management of the city government.  And when Janet by his command obtained the Boston office, he gave the mill treasurer a heated account of the afternoon’s occurrences, explaining circumstantially how, in his absence at a conference in the Patuxent Mill, the mob had gathered in East Street and attacked the Chippering; and he urged the treasurer to waste