of comfort from her own exemption from such questions.

"Business must be a great care," said she, and a look of utter
peaceful reflection upon her own lot overspread her face.

After supper Robert went down to his aunt Cynthia's. He had not been
there for a long time. The minute he entered she started up with an
eagerness which had been completely foreign to her of late years.

"What is the matter, Robert?" she asked, softly. She took both his
hands as she spoke, and her look in his face was full of delicate
caressing.

Robert succumbed at once to this feminine solicitude, of which he
had had lately so little. He felt as if he had relapsed into
childhood. A sense of injury which was exquisite, as it brought
along with it a sense of his demand upon love and sympathy, seized
him.

"I am worried beyond endurance, Aunt Cynthia," said he.

"About the strike? I have read the night papers."

"Yes; I tried to do what was right, even at a sacrifice to myself,
and--"

Cynthia had read about Ellen, but she was a woman, and she said
nothing as to that.

"I tried to do what was right," Robert said, fairly broken down
again.

Cynthia had seated herself, and Robert had taken a low foot-stool at
her side. It came over him as he did so that it had been a favorite
seat of his when a child. As for Cynthia, influenced by the
appealing to the vulnerable place of her nature, she put her slim
hands on her nephew's head, and actually seemed to feel his baby
curls.

"Poor boy," she whispered.

Robert put both his arms around her and hid his face on her
shoulder, for love is a comforter, in whatever guise.

Chapter LV

On the day after the strike Ellen went to McGuire's and to Briggs's,
the two other factories in Rowe, to see if she could obtain a
position; but she was not successful. McGuire had discharged some of
his employes, reducing his force to its smallest possible limits,
since he had fewer orders, and was trying in that way to avert the
necessity of a cut in wages, and a strike or shut-down. McGuire's
was essentially a union factory, as was Briggs's. Ellen would have
found in either case difficulty about obtaining employment, because
she did not belong to the union, if for no other reason. At Briggs's
she encountered the proprietor himself in the office, and he
dismissed her with a bluff, almost brutal, peremptoriness which hurt
her cruelly, although she held up her head high as she left. Briggs
turned to