For her his touch and his acceptance were abundance of reward. Go to Hepplestall! Take charity, when this sustaining faith was granted her? Oh, she would manage though her body cracked. It was a soiling and a shameful thought that these babes were Reuben’s grandchildren. They were not his and John, please God, would never know who was his father; they were hers and John’s and they two would keep them for their own. It wasn’t bravado either. It wasn’t a brief heroical resolution begotten of the emotions caused by Annie’s death. She counted the cost and chose her fight, spurning the thought of Hepplestall as if the justice he might do her were an obscenity. She knew what she undertook to do and, providing only that she had ten more years of life, she would do it. John, mourning for Annie, was not too sunk in grief to be unaware of the fineness of his mother. Would Annie--she who loved her life--have said “Things are,” if she had foreseen how soon the things which were bad were to be so infinitely worse? The factory had killed her, it had taken his Annie from him, it had put upon his mother in her age the burden she took up with a matter of fact resignation that seemed to him the ultimate impeachment of the system which made heroism a commonplace. “Mother!” he cried. “Mother!” “Eh, lad,” she said, “we’ve got to take what comes.” She did not, at least, as Annie did, answer his inarticulate revolt with religion, but she had fundamentally the same resignation to the things of this world, and for the same reason. She, too, looked forward to a radiant life above: she saw in her present troubles the hand of God justly heavy upon one who had been a light woman. John, knowing nothing of that secret source of her humility, attributed all to the one cause, to the Factory which crushed and maimed and killed in spirit as in body. He refused his acceptance, his resignation. There was, there must be, something to be done. But what? What? First, at any rate, Annie had to be buried with the circumstance which seemed to make for decency and for that they had provided through the Benefit Society. This---decent burial--was the first thought behind the weekly contributions paid, heaven knows at what sacrifice, to the Society and they were rewarded now in the fact that Annie was not buried at the expense of the parish. That was all, bare decency, not the flaunting parody with plumes and gin of the slightly less poor: nor were there many mourners. Leave was given to a select few to be absent for an hour from the factory, and the severe fines for unauthorized absence kept the numbers strictly, with one exception, to the few the overseer chose to privilege. Phoebe and John were granted the full day, without fine, and, of course, without wage, and so, it appeared, was Mr. Barraclough. But Mr. Barraclough was on business, and the fine that he would have to pay would figure in the expenses he would charge Mr. Needham.