, wives of the coal-diggers. There was a breathless odour of
copperas. As he went from one room to another up through the ascending
stories, he had a vague sensation of being followed. Some shadow
lurked at times behind the engines, or stole after him in the dark
entries. Were there ghosts, then, in mills in broad daylight? None
but the ghosts of Want and Hunger and Crime, he might have known, that
do not wait for night to walk our streets: the ghosts that poor old
Knowles hoped to lay forever.

Holmes had a room fitted up in the mill, where he slept. He went up to
it slowly, holding the paper tightly in one hand, glancing at the
operatives, the work, through his furtive half-shut eye. Nothing
escaped him. Passing the windows, he did not once look out at the
prophetic dream of beauty he had left without. In the mill he was of
the mill. Yet he went slowly, as if he shrank from the task waiting
for him. Why should he? It was a simple matter of business, this
transfer of Knowles's share in the mill to himself; to-day he was to
decide whether he would conclude the bargain. If any dark history of
wrong lay underneath, if this simple decision of his was to be the
struggle for life and death with him, his cold, firm face told nothing
of it. Let us be just to him, stand by him, if we can, in the midst of
his desolate home and desolate life, and look through his cold,
sorrowful eyes at the deed he was going to do. Dreary enough he
looked, going through the great mill, despite the power in his quiet
face. A man who had strength for solitude; yet, I think, with all his
strength, his mother could not have borne to look back from the dead
that day, to see her boy so utterly alone. The day was the crisis of
his life, looked forward to for years; he held in his hand a sure
passport to fortune. Yet he thrust the hour off, perversely, trifling
with idle fancies, pushing from him the one question which all the
years past and to come had left for this day to decide.

Some such idle fancy it may have been that made the man turn from the
usual way down a narrow passage into which opened doors from small
offices. Margret Howth, he had learned to-day, was in the first one.
He hesitated before he did it, his sallow face turning a trifle paler;
then he went on in his hard, grave way, wondering dimly if she
remembered his step, if she cared to see him now. She used to know
it,--she was the only one in the world who ever had c