" said Robert with triumph, and took her in
his arms again.

But he reckoned without the girl, who was, after all, stronger than
her natural instincts, and able to rise above and subjugate them.
She freed herself from him resolutely, rose, and stood before him,
looking at him quite unfalteringly and accusingly.

"Why do you come now?" she asked. "You say you have loved me from
the first. You came to see me, you walked home with me, and said
things to me that made me think--" She stopped.

"Made you think what, dear?" asked Robert. He was pale and
indescribably anxious and appealing. It was suddenly revealed to him
that this plum was so firmly attached to its bough of individuality
that possibly love itself could not loosen it.

"You made me think that perhaps you did care a little," said Ellen,
in a low but unfaltering voice.

"You thought quite right, only not a little, but a great deal," said
Robert, firmly.

"Then," said Ellen, "the moment I gave up going to college and went
to work you never came to see me again; you never even spoke to me
in the shop; you went right past me without a look."

"Good God! child," Robert interposed, "don't you know why I did
that?"

Ellen looked at him bewildered, then a burning red overspread her
face. "Yes," she replied. "I didn't. But I do now. They would have
talked."

"I thought you would understand that," said Robert. "I had only the
best motives for that. I cannot speak to you in the factory any more
than I have done. I cannot expose you to remark; but as for my not
calling, I believed what you said to my aunt and to me. I thought
that you had deliberately preferred a lower life to a higher
one--that you preferred earning money to something better. I
thought--"

Robert fairly started as Ellen began talking with a fire which
seemed to make her scintillate before his eyes.

"You talk about a lower and a higher life," said she. "Is it true?
Is Vassar College any higher than a shoe-factory? Is any labor which
is honest, and done with the best strength of man, for the best
motives, to support the lives of those he loves, or to supply the
needs of his race, any higher than another? Where would even books
be without this very labor which you despise--the books which I
should have learned at college? Instead of being benefited by the
results of labor, I have become part of labor. Why is that lower?"

Robert stared at her.

"I have come to feel all this since I went t