ster, with a little colour in her cheek. "We know Captain Jack, don't
we?"

"We do!" said Patricia with enthusiasm.

"We do!" echoed Rupert, with a smile that drove Pat into a fury.

CHAPTER VI

THE GRIEVANCE COMMITTEE

There was trouble at the Maitland Mills. For the first time in his
history Grant Maitland found his men look askance at him. For the first
time in his life he found himself viewing with suspicion the workers
whom he had always taken a pride in designating "my men." The situation
was at once galling to his pride and shocking to his sense of fair play.
His men were his comrades in work. He knew them--at least, until these
war days he had known them--personally, as friends. They trusted him and
were loyal to him, and he had taken the greatest care to deal justly
and more than justly by them. No labour troubles had ever disturbed the
relations which existed between him and his men. It was thus no small
shock when Wickes announced one day that a Grievance Committee wished to
interview him. That he should have to meet a Grievance Committee, whose
boast it had been that the first man in the works to know of a grievance
was himself, and that the men with whom he had toiled and shared both
good fortune and ill, but more especially the good, that had befallen
through the last quarter century should have a grievance against
him--this was indeed an experience that cut him to the heart and roused
in him a fury of perplexed indignation.

"A what? A Grievance Committee!" he exclaimed to Wickes, when the old
bookkeeper came announcing such a deputation.

"That's what they call themselves, sir," said Wickes, his tone of
disgust disclaiming all association with any such organization.

"A Grievance Committee?" said Mr. Maitland again. "Well, I'll be! What
do they want? Who are they? Bring them in," he roared in a voice whose
ascending tone indicated his growing amazement and wrath.

"Come in you," growled Wickes in the voice he generally used for his
collie dog, which bore a thoroughly unenviable reputation, "come on in,
can't ye?"

There was some shuffling for place in the group at the door, but finally
Mr. Wigglesworth found himself pushed to the front of a committee of
five. With a swift glance which touched "the boss" in its passage and
then rested upon the wall, the ceiling, the landscape visible through
the window, anywhere indeed rather than upon the face of the man against
whom they had a grievanc