In these days Haworth was more of a lion than ever. He might have dined in state with a social potentate each day if he had been so minded. The bolder spirits visited him at the Works, and would have had him talk the matter over. But he was in the humor for neither festivities nor talk. He knew what foundation his safety rested upon, and spent many a sleepless and feverish night. He was bitter enough at heart against those he had temporarily baffled. "Wait till tha'rt out o' th' woods," he said to Ffrench, when he was betrayed into expressing his sense of relief. Oddly enough, the feeling against Ffrench was disproportionately violent. He was regarded as an alien and a usurper of the rights of others. There existed a large disgust for his gentle birth and breeding, and a sardonic contempt for his incapacity and lack of experience. He had no prestige of success and daring, he had not shown himself in the hour of danger, he took all and gave nothing. "I should not be surprised," said Miss Ffrench to Murdoch, "if we have trouble yet." CHAPTER XXX. MRS. HAWORTH AND GRANNY DIXON. About this time a change appeared in little Mrs. Haworth. Sometimes when they sat together, Haworth found himself looking up suddenly and feeling that her eyes were fixed upon him, and at such times she invariably met his glance with a timid, startled expression, and released herself from it as soon as she had the power. She had never been so tender and lavish with her innocent caresses, but there was continuously a tremulous watchfulness in her manner, which was almost suggestive of fear. It was not fear of him, however. She clung to him with all the strength of her love. At night when he returned home, however late, he was sure of finding her waiting patiently for him, and in the morning when he left the house he was never so early that she was not at his service. The man began to quail before her, and grow restless in secret, and be haunted, when he awakened in the night, by his remembrance of her. "She is on the lookout for something," he said to himself, fearfully. "What have they been saying to her?" On her part, when she sat alone, she used to try and think the matter out, and set it straight and account for it. "It's the strikes," she said, "as has set them agen him and made 'em hard an' forgetful of all he's done. They'd never have spoke so if they'd been theirselves." She could scarcely have told what she had heard, or how the first blow had struck home. She only knew that here and there she had heard at first a rough jeer and then a terrible outspoken story, which, in spite of her disbelief, filled her with dread. The man who first flung the ill-favored story at her stopped half-way through it, the words dying on his lips at the sight of her face. It happened in one of her pensioners' cottages, and she rose from her chair trembling. "I didn't think," she said, with unconscious pathos, "as the world could be so ignorant and wicked."