e to redress the wrong she had done to
Jem in denying him her heart? She took counsel with her friend,
Margaret Legh. When Mary had first known Margaret and her grandfather,
Job Legh--an old man who belonged to the class of Manchester workmen who
are warm and devoted followers of science, a man whose home was like a
wizard's dwelling, filled with impaled insects and books and
instruments--Margaret had a secret fear of blindness. The fear had since
been realised, but she remained the quiet, sensible, tender-hearted girl
she had been before her great deprivation. She opposed Mary's notion of
writing a letter to Jem.

"You must just wait and be patient," she advised; "being patient is the
hardest work we have to do through life, I take it. Waiting is far more
difficult than doing; but it's one of God's lessons we must learn, one
way or another."

So Mary waited. But Jem took his disappointment as final, and her hopes
of seeing him were always baffled.

John Barton, on the night of Jem's proposal, had gone to his union. The
members of the union were all desperate men, ready for anything; made
ready by want. Barton himself was out of work. He had seen much of the
bitterness of poverty in Manchester; now he was feeling the pinch of it
himself.

Ever since the death of his wife, whose end had been hastened by the
sudden and complete disappearance of her darling sister Esther, the wan
colourlessness of his face had been intensified; his stern enthusiasm,
once latent, had become visible; his heart, tenderer than ever towards
the victims of the misery around him, grew harder towards the employers,
whom he believed to be the cause of that misery. Trade grew worse, but
there was no sign that the masters were suffering; they still had their
carriages and their comforts; the woe in these terrible years 1839,
1840, and 1841 seemed to fall wholly upon the poor. It is impossible
even faintly to picture the state of distress which prevailed in
Manchester at that time. Whole families went through a gradual
starvation; John Barton saw them starve, saw fathers and mothers and
children die of low, putrid fever in foetid cellars, and cursed the rich
men who never extended a helping hand to the sufferers.

"Working folk won't be ground to the dust much longer," he declared.
"We'n ha' had as much to bear as human nature can bear."

Fiercer grew he, and more sullen. Darker and darker were the schemes he
brooded over in his desolate home,