ke a baby."

"Oh, it's fine of you to come to me!"

"So," cried Sally, "good-by."

She found her hat and coat and slipped away, not daring to say good-by
to Joe. But as she went through the dark winter night she realized how
one person's happiness is often built on another's tragedy. And so Sally
went, dropping for the time being out of Joe's life.

* * * * *

There was one event that took place two weeks after Myra's coming, which
she did not soon forget. It was the great mass-meeting to celebrate the
return of Rhona and some others who had also been sent to the workhouse.
Myra and Joe sat together. After the music, the speeches, Rhona stepped
forward, slim, pale, and very little before that gigantic auditorium.
She spoke simply.

"I was picketing on Great Jones Street. A man came up and struck me. I
had him arrested. But in court he said I struck him, and the judge sent
me to Blackwells Island. I had to scrub floors. But it was only for five
days. I think we ought all to be glad to go to the workhouse, because
that will help women to be free and help the strikers. I'm glad I went.
It wasn't anything much."

They cheered her, for they saw before them a young heroine, victorious,
beloved, ideal. But when Myra called at Hester Street, a week later,
Rhona's mother had something else to say.

"Rhona? Well, you had ought to seen her when we first landed! Ah! she
was a beauty, my Rhona--such cheeks, such hair, such eyes--laughing all
the time. But now--ach!" She sighed dreadfully. "So it goes. Only, I
wished she wasn't always so afraid--afraid to go out ... afraid ... so
nervous ... so ... different."

Myra never forgot this. It sent her back to her work with wiser and
deeper purpose. And so she fought side by side with Joe through the
blacks weeks of that January. It seemed strange that Joe didn't go
under. He loomed about the place, a big, stoop-shouldered, gaunt man,
with tragic gray face and melancholy eyes and deepening wrinkles. All
the tragedy and pathos and struggle of the strike were marked upon his
features. His face summed up the sorrows of the thirty thousand. Myra
sometimes expected him to collapse utterly. But he bore on, from day to
day, doing his work, meeting his committees, and getting out the paper.

Here, too, Myra found she could help him. She insisted on writing the
strike articles, and as Jacob Izon was also writing, there was only the
editorial for Joe to do.