By some incomprehensible power he dominated.  Panting, fascinated, loath to leave yet fearful, Janet watched him, breathing now deeply this atmosphere of smoke, of strife, and turmoil.  She found it grateful, for the strike, the battle was in her own soul as well.  Momentarily she had forgotten Rolfe, who had been in her mind as she had come hither, and then she caught sight of him in a group in the centre of the hall.  He saw her, he was making his way toward her, he was holding her hands, looking down into her face with that air of appropriation, of possession she remembered.  But she felt no resentment now, only a fierce exultation at having dared.

“You’ve come to join us!” he exclaimed.  “I thought I’d lost you.”

He bent closer to her that she might hear.

“We are having a meeting of the Committee,” he said, and she smiled.  Despite her agitation, this struck her as humorous.  And Rolfe smiled back at her.  “You wouldn’t think so, but Antonelli knows how to manage them.  He is a general.  Come, I will enlist you, you shall be my recruit.”

“But what can I do?” she asked.

“I have been thinking.  You said you were a stenographer—­we need stenographers, clerks.  You will not be wasted.  Come in here.”

Behind her two box-like rooms occupying the width of the building had been turned into offices, and into one of these Rolfe led her.  Men and women were passing in and out, while in a corner a man behind a desk sat opening envelopes, deftly extracting bills and post-office orders and laying them in a drawer.  On the wall of this same room was a bookcase half filled with nondescript volumes.

“The Bibliotheque—­that’s French for the library of the Franco-Belgian Cooperative Association,” explained Rolfe.  “And this is Comrade Sanders.  Sanders is easier to say than Czernowitz.  Here is the young lady I told you about, who wishes to help us—­Miss Bumpus.”

Mr. Sanders stopped counting his money long enough to grin at her.

“You will be welcome,” he said, in good English.  “Stenographers are scarce here.  When can you come?”

“To-morrow morning,” answered Janet.

“Good,” he said.  “I’ll have a machine for you.  What kind do you use?”

She told him.  Instinctively she took a fancy to this little man, whose flannel shirt and faded purple necktie, whose blue, unshaven face and tousled black hair seemed incongruous with an alert, business-like, and efficient manner.  His nose, though not markedly Jewish, betrayed in him the blood of that vital race which has triumphantly survived so many centuries of bondage and oppression.

“He was a find, Czernowitz—­he calls himself Sanders,” Rolfe explained, as they entered the hall once more.  “An Operative in the Patuxent, educated himself, went to night school—­might have been a capitalist like so many of his tribe if he hadn’t loved humanity.  You’ll get along with him.”