It has, indeed, a knell-like ring.  Do philosophies tend also to cast those who adopt them into a mould?  These were of the self-same breed, indubitably the followers of Antonelli.  The men wore their hair long, affected, like their leader, soft felt hats and loose black ties that fell over the lapels of their coats.  Loose morals and loose ties!  The projection of these against a Puritan background ties symbolical of everything the Anglo-Saxon shudders at and abhors; of anarchy and mob rule, of bohemia and vagabondia, of sedition and murder, of Latin revolutions and reigns of terror; of sex irregularity—­not of the clandestine sort to be found in decent communities—­but of free love that flaunts itself in the face of an outraged public.  For there were women in the band.  All this, and more, the invaders suggested—­atheism, unfamiliarity with soap and water, and, more vaguely, an exotic poetry and art that to the virile of American descent is saturated with something indefinable yet abhorrent.  Such things are felt.  Few of the older citizens of Hampton were able to explain why something rose in their gorges, why they experienced a new and clammy quality of fear and repulsion when, on the day following Antonelli’s advent, these strangers arrived from nowhere to install themselves—­with no baggage to speak of —­in Hampton’s more modest but hitherto respectable hostelries.  And no sooner had the city been rudely awakened to the perilous presence, in overwhelming numbers, of ignorant and inflammable foreigners than these turned up and presumed to lead the revolt, to make capital out of it, to interpret it in terms of an exotic and degenerate creed.  Hampton would take care of itself—­or else the sovereign state within whose borders it was would take care of it.  And his Honour the Mayor, who had proclaimed his faith in the reasonableness of the strikers, who had scorned the suggestions of indignant inhabitants that the Governor be asked for soldiers, twenty-four hours too late arranged for the assembly of three companies of local militia in the armory, and swore in a hundred extra police.

The hideous stillness of Fillmore Street was driving Janet mad.  What she burned to do was to go to Boston and take a train for somewhere in the West, to lose herself, never to see Hampton again.  But—­there was her mother.  She could not leave Hannah in these empty rooms, alone; and Edward was to remain at the mill, to eat and sleep there, until the danger of the strike had passed.  A messenger had come to fetch his clothes.  After leaving Ditmar in the office of the mill, Janet crept up the dark stairs to the flat and halted in the hallway.  Through the open doorway of the dining-room she saw Hannah seated on the horsehair sofa —­for the first time within memory idle at this hour of the day.  Nothing else could have brought home to her like this the sheer tragedy of their plight.  Until then Janet had been sustained by anger and excitement, by physical action.  She thought Hannah was staring at her; after a moment it seemed that the widened pupils were fixed in fascination on something beyond, on the Thing that had come to dwell here with them forever.