“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.”

“I’m sure I shall,” she replied.

Rolfe took from his pocket a little red button with the letters I.W.W. printed across it.  He pinned it, caressingly, on her coat.

“Now you are one of us!” he exclaimed.  “You’ll come to-morrow?”

“I’ll come to-morrow,” she repeated, drawing away from him a little.

“And—­we shall be friends?”

She nodded.  “I must go now, I think.”

“Addio!” he said.  “I shall look for you.  For the present I must remain here, with the Committee.”

When Janet reached Faber Street she halted on the corner of Stanley to stare into the window of the glorified drugstore.  But she gave no heed to the stationery, the cameras and candy displayed there, being in the emotional state that reduces to unreality objects of the commonplace, everyday world.  Presently, however, she became aware of a man standing beside her.

“Haven’t we met before?” he asked.  “Or—­can I be mistaken?”

Some oddly familiar quizzical note in his voice stirred, as she turned to him, a lapsed memory.  The hawklike yet benevolent and illuminating look he gave her recalled the man at Silliston whom she had thought a carpenter though he was dressed now in a warm suit of gray wool, and wore a white, low collar.