“Lena, you will not leave this town. You will come to the chapel as usual. You will sing with us next Sunday. You will pay no attention to anything that you hear, or see. You will never suffer yourself even to _suppose_ that any base, low mind or tongue can injure your pastor. You will do as I bid you, and you will become the woman you promised to. You will do this with my help or without it. Anything may happen to a person. Nothing can undo a promise.” “Mr. Bayard, sir,” said Lena, forcing back her tears, for she was not a crying girl, “I’m a girl of my word, and I ain’t goin’ back on you. But there’s one thing I’ve got to say. Mebbe I shouldn’t have another chance, bein’ things are as they be. I _did_ want to ask you, Mr. Bayard, sir, if I was to be a good girl long enough,--as long as you should set the time to make me fit,--do you suppose, Mr. Bayard, you would ever feel so as if you could touch your hat to me--same as you do to decent girls?” The superintendent of the powder factory brushed his hand across his eyes. Bayard was much moved. The dark, little figure of the girl, in her working-clothes, standing stolidly at her post in the most dangerous of the deadly trades, wherein no “hand” can insure his life, blurred before the minister. He thought how little life could mean to Lena, at its kindest and best. “When the time comes,” he said gently, “I shall lift my hat to you.” “That’s worth while,” said Lena in her short, forcible way. She turned and went back to her work. The factory seemed to throb with the struggle of imprisoned death to burst its bars. Bayard came out into the air with the long breath which the bravest man always drew when he left the buildings. These incidents (which are events to the solitary, missionary life) were but two days old when Joey Slip climbed the minister’s stairs, sobbing dolorously. Rumor was running in Windover that Job was drunk again. Neither the child nor the wife could say if truth were in it, for neither had seen the man since yesterday. But Mari had dispatched the boy to the minister with the miserable news. With a smothered exclamation which Joey found it impossible to translate, Bayard snatched the child’s hand, and set forth. His face wore a terrible look. He reached the wharves in time to come directly upon Job, the centre of a ring of jeering roughs. Muddy, wet, torn, splashed with slime from the docks, hatless and raving, Job was doing his maudlin best to fight Ben Trawl, who stood at a safe distance, smiling with the cynicism of a rumseller who never drinks. Job--poor Job, the “reformed man”; Job, who had fought harder for his manhood than most sober men ever fight for anything from the baby’s crib to the broadcloth casket; Job, the “pillar” of Christlove mission, the pride and pet of the struggling people; Job, the one sure comfort of his pastor’s most discouraged hour,--Job stood there, abased and hideous.