“Yes—­but you have to feel it, you have to know what it is to be kept down and crushed.  If you’d only stay here awhile.”

“Oh, I intend to,” he replied.

She could not have said why, but she felt a certain relief on hearing this.

“Then you’ll see for yourself!” she cried.  “I guess that’s what you’ve come for, isn’t it?”

“Well, partly.  To tell the truth, I’ve come to open a restaurant.”

“To open a restaurant!” Somehow she was unable to imagine him as the proprietor of a restaurant.  “But isn’t it rather a bad time?” she gasped.

“I don’t look as if I had an eye for business—­do I?  But I have.  No, it’s a good time—­so many people will be hungry, especially children.  I’m going to open a restaurant for children.  Oh, it will be very modest, of course—­I suppose I ought to call it a soup kitchen.”

“Oh!” she exclaimed, staring at him.  “Then you really—­” the sentence remained unfinished.  “I’m sorry,” she said simply.  “You made me think—­”

“Oh, you mustn’t pay any attention to what I say.  Come ’round and see my establishment, Number 77 Dey Street, one flight up, no elevator.  Will you?”

She laughed tremulously as he took her hand.

“Yes indeed, I will,” she promised.  And she stood awhile staring after him.  She was glad he had come to Hampton, and yet she did not even know his name.

CHAPTER XVI

She had got another place—­such was the explanation of her new activities Janet gave to Hannah, who received it passively.  And the question dreaded about Ditmar was never asked.  Hannah had become as a child, performing her tasks by the momentum of habituation, occasionally talking simply of trivial, every-day affairs, as though the old life were going on continuously.  At times, indeed, she betrayed concern about Edward, wondering whether he were comfortable at the mill, and she washed and darned the clothes he sent home by messenger.  She hoped he would not catch cold.  Her suffering seemed to have relaxed.  It was as though the tortured portion of her brain had at length been seared.  To Janet, her mother’s condition when she had time to think of it—­was at once a relief and a new and terrible source of anxiety.

Mercifully, however, she had little leisure to reflect on that tragedy, else her own sanity might have been endangered.  As soon as breakfast was over she hurried across the city to the Franco-Belgian Hall, and often did not return until nine o’clock at night, usually so tired that she sank into bed and fell asleep.  For she threw herself into her new labours with the desperate energy that seeks forgetfulness, not daring to pause to think about herself, to reflect upon what the future might hold for her when the strike should be over.  Nor did she confine herself to typewriting, but, as with Ditmar, constantly assumed a greater burden of duty, helping Czernowitz—­who