er back turned, directly before him, he gave no sign of
being aware of her presence.

"It wasn't the gatekeeper's fault," she heard Orcutt reply in a tone
quivering with excitement and apprehension. "They really didn't give us a
chance--that's the truth. They were down Canal Street and over the bridge
before we knew it."

"It's just as I've said a hundred times," Ditmar retorted. "I can't
afford to leave this mill a minute, I can't trust anybody--" and he broke
out in another tirade against the intruders. "By God, I'll fix 'em for
this--I'll crush 'em. And if any operatives try to walkout here I'll see
that they starve before they get back--after all I've done for 'em, kept
the mill going in slack times just to give 'em work. If they desert me
now, when I've got this Bradlaugh order on my hands--" Speech became an
inadequate expression of his feelings, and suddenly his eye fell on
Janet. She had turned, but her look made no impression on him. "Call up
the Chief of Police," he said.

Automatically she obeyed, getting the connection and handing him the
receiver, standing by while he denounced the incompetence of the
department for permitting the mob to gather in East Street and demanded
deputies. The veins of his forehead were swollen as he cut short the
explanations of the official and asked for the City Hall. In making an
appointment with the Mayor he reflected on the management of the city
government. And when Janet by his command obtained the Boston office, he
gave the mill treasurer a heated account of the afternoon's occurrences,
explaining circumstantially how, in his absence at a conference in the
Patuxent Mill, the mob had gathered in East Street and attacked the
Chippering; and he urged the treasurer to waste no time in obtaining a
force of detectives, in securing in Boston and New York all the
operatives that could be hired, in order to break the impending strike.
Save for this untimely and unreasonable revolt he was bent on stamping
out, for Ditmar the world to-day was precisely the same world it had been
the day before. It seemed incredible to Janet that he could so regard it,
could still be blind to the fact that these workers whom he was
determined to starve and crush if they dared to upset his plans and
oppose his will were human beings with wills and passions and grievances
of their own. Until to-day her eyes had been sealed. In agony they had
been opened to the panorama of sorrow and suffering, of pass