“Oh, it was a pleasure, Miss Bumpus,” he declared.  “And sometime, when you want to see the Print Works or the Worsted Department, let me know—­I’m your man.  And—­I won’t mention it.”

She did not answer.  As they made their way back to the office he glanced at her covertly, astonished at the emotional effect in her their tour had produced.  Though not of an inflammable temperament, he himself was stirred, and it was she who, unaccountably, had stirred him:  suggested, in these processes he saw every day, and in which he was indeed interested, something deeper, more significant and human than he had guessed, and which he was unable to define....

Janet herself did not know why this intimate view of the mills, of the people who worked in them had so greatly moved her.  All day she thought of them.  And the distant throb of the machinery she felt when her typewriter was silent meant something to her now—­she could not say what.  When she found herself listening for it, her heart beat faster.  She had lived and worked beside it, and it had not existed for her, it had had no meaning, the mills might have been empty.  She had, indeed, many, many times seen these men and women, boys and girls trooping away from work, she had strolled through the quarters in which they lived, speculated on the lands from which they had come; but she had never really thought of them as human beings, individuals, with problems and joys and sorrows and hopes and fears like her own.  Some such discovery was borne in upon her.  And always an essential function of this revelation, looming larger than ever in her consciousness, was Ditmar.  It was for Ditmar they toiled, in Ditmar’s hands were their very existences, his was the stupendous responsibility and power.

As the afternoon wore, desire to see these toilers once more took possession of her.  From the white cupola perched above the huge mass of the Clarendon Mill across the water sounded the single stroke of a bell, and suddenly the air was pulsing with sounds flung back and forth by the walls lining the river.  Seizing her hat and coat, she ran down the stairs and through the vestibule and along the track by the canal to the great gates, which her father was in the act of unbarring.  She took a stand beside him, by the gatehouse.  Edward showed a mild surprise.

“There ain’t anything troubling you—­is there, Janet?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“I wanted to see the hands come out,” she said.

Sometimes, as at present, he found Janet’s whims unaccountable.

“Well, I should have presumed you’d know what they look like by this time.  You’d better stay right close to me, they’re a rough lot, with no respect or consideration for decent folks—­these foreigners.  I never could see why the government lets ’em all come over here.”  He put on the word “foreigners” an emphasis of contempt and indignation, pathetic because of its peculiar note of futility.  Janet paid no attention