“My God—­won’t you trust me?” he begged, with a tremendous effort to collect himself.  “You trusted me yesterday.  What’s happened to change you?  Won’t you tell me?  It’s nothing I’ve done—­I swear.  And what do you mean when you say you were in that mob?  I was almost crazy when I came back and found they’d been here in this mill—­can’t you understand?  It wasn’t that I didn’t think of you.  I’d been worrying about you all day.  Look at this thing sensibly.  I love you, I can’t get along without you—­I’ll marry you.  I said I would, I meant it I’ll marry you just as soon as I can clean up this mess of a strike.  It won’t take long.”

“Don’t touch me!” she commanded, and he recoiled again.  “I’ll tell you where I’ve been, if you want to know,—­I’ve been to see my sister in—­in a house, in Boston.  I guess you know what kind of a house I mean, you’ve been in them, you’ve brought women to them,—­just like the man that brought her there.  Would you marry me now—­with my sister there?  And am I any different from her?  You you’ve made me just like her.”  Her voice had broken, now, into furious, uncontrolled weeping—­to which she paid no heed.

Ditmar was stunned; he could only stare at her.

“If I have a child,” she said, “I’ll—­I’ll kill you—­I’ll kill myself.”

And before he could reply—­if indeed he had been able to reply—­she had left the office and was running down the stairs....

CHAPTER XIV

What was happening to Hampton?  Some hundreds of ignorant foreigners, dissatisfied with the money in their pay envelopes, had marched out of the Clarendon Mill and attacked the Chippering and behold, the revered structure of American Government had quivered and tumbled down like a pack of cards!  Despite the feverish assurances in the Banner “extra” that the disturbance was merely local and temporary, solid citizens became panicky, vaguely apprehending the release of elemental forces hitherto unrecognized and unknown.  Who was to tell these solid, educated business men that the crazy industrial Babel they had helped to rear, and in which they unconsciously dwelt, was no longer the simple edifice they thought it? that Authority, spelled with a capital, was a thing of the past? that human instincts suppressed become explosives to displace the strata of civilization and change the face of the world? that conventions and institutions, laws and decrees crumble before the whirlwind of human passions? that their city was not of special, but of universal significance?  And how were these, who still believed themselves to be dwelling under the old dispensation, to comprehend that environments change, and changing demand new and terrible Philosophies?  When night fell on that fateful Tuesday the voice of Syndicalism had been raised in a temple dedicated to ordered, Anglo-Saxon liberty—­the Hampton City Hall.