advanced with no yielding in her, her brave face looking ahead
through the white blur of snow with a confidence which was almost
exultation.

"What do you think the men will do?" she said to Abby when they came
in sight of Lloyd's, shaggy with fringes and wreaths and overhanging
shelvings of snow, roaring with machinery, with the steady stream of
labor pouring in the door.

"Do?" repeated Abby, almost listlessly. "Do about what?"

"About the cut in wages?"

Abby turned on her with sudden fire. "Oh, my God, what can they do,
Ellen Brewster?" she demanded. "Haven't they got to live? Hasn't
Lloyd got it all his own way? How are men to live in weather like
this without work? Bread without butter is better than none at all,
and life at any cost is better than death for them you love. What
can they do?"

"It seems to me there is only one thing to do," replied Ellen.

Abby stared at her wonderingly. "You don't mean--" she said, as they
climbed up the stairs.

"I mean I would do anything, at whatever cost to myself, to defeat
injustice," said Ellen, in a loud, clear voice.

Several men turned and looked back at her and laughed bitterly.

"It's easy talking," said one to another.

"That's so," returned the other.

The people all settled to their work as usual. One of the foremen
(Dennison), who was anxious to curry favor with his employer,
reported to him in an undertone in the office that everything was
quiet. Robert nodded easily. He had not anticipated anything else.
In the course of the morning he looked into the room where Ellen was
employed, and saw with relief and concern her fair head before her
machine. It seemed to him that he could not bear it one instant
longer to have her working in this fashion, that he must lift her
out of it. He still tingled with his rebuff of the night before, but
he had never loved her so well, for the idea that the cut in wages
affected her relation to him never occurred to him. As he walked
through the room none of the workers seemed to notice him, but
worked with renewed energy. He might have been invisible for all the
attention he seemed to excite. He looked with covert tenderness at
the back of Ellen's head, and passed on. He reflected that he had
adopted the measure of wage-cutting with no difficulty whatever.

"All it needs is a little firmness," he thought, with a boyish
complacency in his own methods. "Now I can keep on with the factory,
and no turning the poor people