his hopes
and his wonder, and murmuring only, when he dropped again to the chair
at her side: "You won't go, Johnny--you won't go."

* * * * *

Mrs. Westmore lingered on for over two weeks, and during that time
Amherst was able, in various directions, to develop her interest in the
mill-workers. His own schemes involved a complete readjustment of the
relation between the company and the hands: the suppression of the
obsolete company "store" and tenements, which had so long sapped the
thrift and ambition of the workers; the transformation of the Hopewood
grounds into a park and athletic field, and the division of its
remaining acres into building lots for the mill-hands; the establishing
of a library, a dispensary and emergency hospital, and various other
centres of humanizing influence; but he refrained from letting her see
that his present suggestion was only a part of this larger plan, lest
her growing sympathy should be checked. He had in his mother an example
of the mind accessible only to concrete impressions: the mind which
could die for the particular instance, yet remain serenely indifferent
to its causes. To Mrs. Amherst, her son's work had been interesting
simply because it _was_ his work: remove his presence from Westmore, and
the whole industrial problem became to her as non-existent as star-dust
to the naked eye. And in Bessy Westmore he divined a nature of the same
quality--divined, but no longer criticized it. Was not that
concentration on the personal issue just the compensating grace of her
sex? Did it not offer a warm tint of human inconsistency to eyes chilled
by contemplating life in the mass? It pleased Amherst for the moment to
class himself with the impersonal student of social problems, though in
truth his interest in them had its source in an imagination as open as
Bessy's to the pathos of the personal appeal. But if he had the same
sensitiveness, how inferior were his means of expressing it! Again and
again, during their talks, he had the feeling which had come to him when
she bent over Dillon's bed--that her exquisite lines were, in some
mystical sense, the visible flowering of her nature, that they had taken
shape in response to the inward motions of the heart.

To a young man ruled by high enthusiasms there can be no more dazzling
adventure than to work this miracle in the tender creature who yields
her mind to his--to see, as it were, the blossoming of the