her Ellen would be or
do this or that when she should be a woman. He resented the
conception of the woman which would swallow up, like some
metaphysical sorceress, his fair little child. So when he now and
then led Ellen past the factories it was never with the slightest
surmise as to any connection which she might have with them beyond
the present one. "There's the shop where father works," he would
tell Ellen, with a tender sense of his own importance in his child's
eyes, and he was as proud as Punch when Ellen was able to point with
her tiny pink finger at the window where father worked. "That's
where father works and earns money to buy nice things for little
Ellen," Andrew would repeat, beaming at her with divine foolishness,
and Ellen looked at the roaring, vibrating building as she might
have looked at the wheels of progress. She realized that her father
was very great and smart to work in a place like that, and earn
money--so much of it. Ellen often heard her mother remark with pride
how much money Andrew earned.

To-night, when Ellen passed in her strange flight, the factories
were still, though they were yet blazing with light. The gigantic
buildings, after a style of architecture as simple as a child's
block house, and adapted to as primitive an end, loomed up beside
the road like windowed shells enclosing massive concretenesses of
golden light. They looked entirely vacant except for light, for the
workmen had all gone home, and there were only the keepers in the
buildings. There were three of them, representing three different
firms, rival firms, grouped curiously close together, but Lloyd's
was much the largest. Andrew and Eva worked in Lloyd's.

She was near the last factory when she met a man hastening along
with bent shoulders, of intent, middle-aged progress. After he had
passed her with a careless glance at the small, swift figure, she
smelt coffee. He was carrying home a pound for his breakfast supply.
That suddenly made her cry, though she did not know why. That
familiar odor of home and the wontedness of life made her isolation
on her little atom of the unusual more pitiful. The man turned round
sharply when she sobbed. "Hullo! what's the matter, sis?" he called
back, in a pleasant, hoarse voice. Ellen did not answer; she fled as
if she had wings on her feet. The man had many children of his own,
and was accustomed to their turbulence over trifles. He kept on,
thinking that there was a sulky child