hands flying over the sheets of leather,
but the tears ran down his cheeks. Lloyd's emptied itself into the
street, and surrounded Eva Loud and Ellen, who, running aimlessly,
had come straight to her aunt. Jim Tenny was first.

Eva stood clasping the child, who was too frightened to cry, and was
breathing in hushed gasps, her face hidden on her aunt's broad
bosom. Eva had caught her up at the first sight of her, and now she
stood clasping her fiercely, and looking at them all as if she
thought they wanted to rob her of the child. Even when a great cheer
went up from the crowd, and was echoed by another from the factory,
with an accompaniment of waving bare, leather-stained arms and
hands, that expression of desperate defiance instead of the joy of
recovery did not leave her face, not until she saw Jim Tenny's face
working with repressed emotion and met his eyes full of the memory
of old comradeship. Then her bold heart and her pride all melted and
she burst out in a great wail before them all.

"Oh, Jim!" she cried out. "Oh, Jim, I lost you, and then I thought
I'd lost her! Oh, Jim!"

Then there was a chorus of feminine sobs, for Eva's wild weeping had
precipitated the ready sympathy of half the girls present. The men
started a cheer to cover a certain chivalrous shamefacedness which
was upon them at the sight of the girl's grief, and another cheer
from the factory echoed it. Then came another sound, the great
steam-whistle of Lloyd's; then the whistles of the other neighboring
factories responded, and people began to swarm out of them, and the
windows to fill with eager faces. Jim Tenny grasped Eva's arm with a
grasp like a vise. "Come this way," said he, sharply. "Come this
way, Eva."

"Oh, Jim! oh, Jim!" Eva sobbed again; but she followed him, little
Ellen's golden fleece tossing over her shoulder.

"She's got her; she's got her!" shouted the people.

[Illustration: 'She's got her!' Shouted the people]

Then the leather-stained hands gyrated, the cheers went up, and
again the whistles blew.

Jim Tenny, with his hand on Eva's arm, pushed his way through the
crowd.

"Where you goin', Jim?" asked the pretty girl at his elbow, but he
pushed past her roughly, and did not seem to hear. Eva's face was
all inflamed and convulsed with sobs, but she did not dream of
covering it--she was full of the holy shamelessness of grief and
joy. "Let me see her! let me see her! Oh, the dear little thing,
only look at her! Wh