an enforced one, for
the faces showed little joy. Possibly a strike was on. The anxiety he
everywhere saw pictured on young faces and old, argued some trouble; but
if the trouble was that, why were all heads turned indifferently from
the Works, and why were the Works themselves in full blast?

These questions he may have asked himself and he may not. His attention
was entirely centred on the house he saw before him and on the possible
developments awaiting him there. Nothing else mattered. Briskly he
stepped out along the sandy road, and after a turn or two which led him
quite away from the Works and its surrounding buildings, he came out
upon the highway and this house.

It was a low and unpretentious one, and had but one distinguishing
feature. The porch which hung well over the doorstep was unique in shape
and gave an air of picturesqueness to an otherwise simple exterior; a
picturesqueness which was much enhanced in its effect by the background
of illimitable forest, which united the foreground of this pleasing
picture with the great chain of hills which held the Works and town in
its ample basin.

As he approached the doorstep, his mind involuntarily formed an
anticipatory image of the child whose first stitches in embroidery were
like a fairy's weaving to the strong man who worked in ore and possibly
figured out bridges. That she would prove to be of the anemic type,
common among working girls gifted with an imagination they have but
scant opportunity to exercise, he had little doubt.

He was therefore greatly taken aback, when at his first step upon the
porch, the door before him flew open and he beheld in the dark recess
beyond a young woman of such bright and blooming beauty that he hardly
noticed her expression of extreme anxiety, till she lifted her hand and
laid an admonitory finger softly on her lip:

"Hush!" she whispered, with an earnestness which roused him from his
absorption and restored him to the full meaning of this encounter.
"There is sickness in the house and we are very anxious. Is your errand
an important one? If not--" The faltering break in the fresh, young
voice, the look she cast behind her into the darkened interior, were
eloquent with the hope that he would recognise her impatience and pass
on.

And so he might have done,--so he would have done under all ordinary
circumstances. But if this was Doris--and he did not doubt the fact
after the first moment of startled surprise--how da