ard she meant to try? For a minute she had a desperate impulse to turn
and run. Then she heard Mandy's thin, flatted tones announcing:

"This hyer girl wants to git a job in the mill. Miz Bence, she cain't
come down this morning--you'll have to git somebody to tend her looms
till noon; Pap, he's sick, and she has obliged to wait on him--so I
brung the new gal."

"All right," said the man she addressed. "She can wait there; you go on
to your looms."

Johnnie sat on the bench against the wall where newcomers applying for
positions were placed. The man she was to see had not yet come to his
desk, and she remained unnoticed and apparently forgotten for more than
an hour. The offices were entered from the other side, yet a doorway
close by Johnnie commanded a view of a room and desk. To it presently
came one who seated himself and began opening and reading letters.
Johnnie caught her breath and leaned a little forward, watching him, her
heart in her eyes, hands locked hard together in her lap. It was the
young man of the car. He was not in white flannels now, but he looked
almost as wonderful to the girl in his gray business suit, with the air
of easy command, and the quiet half-smile only latent on his face. Shade
Buckheath had spoken of Gray Stoddard as the boss of the bosses down at
Cottonville. Indeed, his position was unique. Inheritor of large
holdings in Eastern cotton-mill stock, he had returned from abroad on
the death of his father, to look into this source of his very ample
income. The mills in which he was concerned were not earning as they
should, so he was told; and there was discussion as to whether they be
moved south, or a Southern mill be established which might be considered
in the nature of a branch, and where the coarser grades of sheeting
would be manufactured, as well as all the spinning done.

But Stoddard was not of the blood that takes opinions second-hand. Upon
his mother's side he was the grandson of one of the great anti-slavery
agitators. The sister of this man, Gray's great-aunt, had stood beside
him on the platform when there was danger in it; and after the Negro was
freed and enfranchised, she had devoted a long life to the cause of
woman suffrage. The mother who bore him died young. She left him to the
care of a conservative father, but the blood that came through her did
not make for conservatism.

Perhaps it was some admixture of his father's traits which set the young
man to investig