ille
was conscious of an inward shrinking before the remembrance of the
terrible old lady. He expected every minute to hear the grating
upward slide of the window and that old voice, which had in it a
terrible intimidation of feminine will. Granville had a mother as
gentle as himself, and a woman with the strength of her own
conviction upon her filled him with awe as of something anomalous.
He wondered uneasily what he should do if the old lady were to hail
him and call him to an account again, whether it would be a more
manly course to face her, or obey, since she was Ellen's
grandmother. He kept an uneasy eye upon the house, and presently,
when he saw the stern old face at the window, he quailed a little.
But Ellen for the first time in her life took his arm, and the two
marched past under the fire of Mrs. Zelotes's gaze. Ellen had
retaliated, not nobly, but as naturally under the conditions of her
life at that time as the branch of a tree blows east before the west
wind.

[Illustration: He found himself walking home from school with her]

Chapter XVI

Ellen, when she graduated, was openly pronounced the flower of her
class. Not a girl equalled her, not a boy surpassed her. When Ellen
came home one night about two months before her graduation, and
announced that she was to have the valedictory, such a light of pure
joy flashed over her mother's face that she looked ten years
younger.

"Well, I guess your father will be pleased enough," she said. She
was hard at work, finishing women's wrappers of cheap cotton. The
hood industry had failed some time before, since the hoods had gone
out of fashion. The same woman had taken a contract to supply a
large firm with wrappers, and employed many in the neighborhood,
paying them the smallest possible prices. This woman was a usurer on
a scale so pitiful and petty that it almost condoned usury.
Sometimes a man on discovering the miserable pittance for which his
wife toiled during every minute which she could snatch from her
household duties and the care of her children, would inveigh against
it. "That woman is cheating you," he would say, to be met with the
argument that she herself was only making ten cents on a wrapper.
Looked at in that light, the wretched profit of the workers did not
seem so out of proportion. It was usury in a nutshell, so
infinitesimal as almost to escape detection. Fanny worked every
minute which she could secure on these wrappers--the ung