"You'd get your fill of it if you was with me," Birdie said importantly. "Seven nights a week and two matinees." "'Twouldn't be any too much for me," said Nance. "I could dance in my sleep." Birdie was sitting in the window now, ostensibly examining her full red lips in a pocket-mirror, but in reality watching the factory yard below. "There goes your whistle!" she said, getting up suddenly. "Say, Nance, can't you scare up an excuse to hook off this afternoon? I'll take you to a show if you will!" Nance's pulses leapt at the thought, but she shook her head and went reluctantly back to her bench. For the next ten minutes her fingers lagged at their task, and she grew more and more discontented. All the youth in her clamored suddenly for freedom. She was tired of being the slave of a whistle, a cog in a machine. With a sudden rash impulse she threw down her tools and, slipping her hat from its peg, went in swift pursuit of Birdie. At the foot of the narrow stairs she came to a sudden halt. Outside the door, in the niche made by the gas-pipe and the adjoining wall, stood Mac Clarke and Birdie. He had his arms about her, and there was a look in his face that Nance had never seen in a man's face before. Of course it was meant for the insolent eyes under the picture hat, but instead it fell on Nance standing in the doorway. For a full minute his ardent gaze held her captive; then he dropped his arms in sudden embarrassment, and she melted out of the doorway and fled noiselessly up the stairway. On the upper landing she suffered a head-on collision with the foreman, who demanded in no gentle tones what in the devil she was doing out there with her hat on at that hour. "None of your business," said Nance, recklessly. Bean looked at her flashing eyes and flushed face, and laughed. She was the youngest girl in the factory and the only one who was not afraid of him. "See here," he said, "I am going to kiss you or fire you. Which'll you have?" Nance dodged his outstretched hand and reached the top step. "You won't do neither!" she cried fiercely. "You can't fire me, because I fired myself ten minutes ago, and I wouldn't kiss you to stay in heaven, let alone a damned old bottle factory!" It was the Nance of the slums who spoke--the Nance whose small bare fists had fought the world too long for the knuckles to be tender. She had drifted a long way from the carefully acquired refinements of Forest Home, but its influence, like a dragging anchor, still sought to hold her against the oncoming gales of life. CHAPTER XIV IDLENESS