“Why should we hitch our good cause to their doubtful one?” reflected Richard.  “We have no concessions or proposals to make.  When our men are ready to come back to us, they will receive just wages and fair treatment.  They know that.  We do not want to fight the molders.  Let the iron-mills do their own fighting;” and Richard stolidly employed himself in taking an account of stock, and forwarding by express to their destination the ten or twelve carved mantel-pieces that happily completed the last contract.

Then his responsibilities shrunk to winding up the office clock and keeping Mr. Slocum firmly on his legs.  The latter was by far the more onerous duty, for Mr. Slocum ran down two or three times in the course of every twenty-four hours, while the clock once wound was fixed for the day.

“If I could only have a good set of Waltham works put into your father,” said Richard to Margaret, after one of Mr. Slocum’s relapses, “he would go better.”

“Poor papa! he is not a fighter, like you.”

“Your father is what I call a belligerent non-combatant.”

Richard was seeing a great deal of Margaret these days.  Mr. Slocum had invited him to sleep in the studio until the excitement was past.  Margaret was afraid to have him take that long walk between the yard and his lodgings in Lime Street, and then her father was an old man to be without any protection in the house in such untoward times.

So Richard slept in the studio, and had his plate at table, like one of the family.  This arrangement was favorable to many a stolen five minutes with Margaret, in the hall or on the staircase.  In these fortuitous moments he breathed an atmosphere that sustained him in his task of dispelling Mr. Slocum’s recurrent fits of despondency.  Margaret had her duties, too, at this period, and the forenoons were sacred to them.

One morning as she passed down the street with a small wicker basket on her arm, Richard said to Mr. Slocum,—­

“Margaret has joined the strikers.”

The time had already come to Stillwater when many a sharp-faced little urchin—­as dear to the warm, deep bosom that had nursed it as though it were a crown prince—­would not have had a crust to gnaw if Margaret Slocum had not joined the strikers.  Sometimes her heart drooped on the way home from these errands, upon seeing how little of the misery she could ward off.  On her rounds there was one cottage in a squalid lane where the children asked for bread in Italian.  She never omitted to halt at that door.

“Is it quite prudent for Margaret to be going about so?” queried Mr. Slocum.

“She is perfectly safe,” said Richard,—­“as safe as a Sister of Charity, which she is.”

Indeed, Margaret might then have gone loaded with diamonds through the streets at midnight.  There was not a rough man in Stillwater who would not have reached forth an arm to shield her.

“It is costing me nearly as much as it would to carry on the yard,” said Mr. Slocum, “but I never put out any stamps more willingly.”