“The greatest thing happened me since my first drink,” he kept saying like a refrain, as he cut long festoons of coloured paper to hang about the mantel and the thinly gilt picture frames. He went By the Bridge to Jarlsen’s old room, which was still in some confusion, with his working clothes tossed aside by Wavering Jim. Jarlsen had folded them neatly when he had donned his wedding suit to go pay off the men. It was Jarlsen’s portrait in crayon that Quarry had come for. He tied it up with a lank bow-knot of cheap _crêpe_, and laughed in real mirth. “Now, Jarlsen,” he said in banter, “I do seem to see myself somehow in the glass over your portrait. Funny, ain’t it?” By the Bridge he purchased five sticks of pretzels, for in Soot City long sticks are run by venders through these open-work wares. When all was ready at the Buttes’s, he helped lift the big Swede from Emma’s cot to the kitchen table. He was dressed, of course, in what was to have been his wedding suit, and the odd lengths of hair that were left him were brushed out on either side of his head to make a good show. His beard had not grown on one cheek, and Quarry surveyed him with great satisfaction. “Seems they’ve kind o’ singed them right-hand glands where the hair starts out,” he said. “It’s real hard to keep your complexion right here.” Emma had been sleeping on a couple of ironing boards laid on the hard clay of the lean-to where the pans and scant house-tackle were kept. The thought of hardship had not occurred to her. She had saved her heartbroken minutes for the sordid privacy of the chill lean-to. The place had for her the charm of liberty, which, we are told, is the charm of paradise itself. Her behaviour was not very agonized. She crouched on the blanketed boards and courted the slow tears that crept from her eyes and were healing to her hurt. They alone relieved her; and sometimes, when they would not come, she would grip the scant old skirt that covered her and pray in a loud whisper, with the vital faith of the poor. When she woke on the morning of the blast rite they had already moved Jarlsen. He lay on the table, roused, but baffled by the strange dimness in him. No voices and no light could come into his world except through memory; he was heir to a limitless pain in the sense of tyrannic suppression that possessed him. Etiquette assigned Emma the place by the stove. She took it at once as the mourners were gathering rapidly. The company at the wedding dance was indistinguishable in the crowd of to-day. There were many operatives and all the foremen--of the new vein, the nutt, and bolt factory, etc. These last had their clerks in attendance. Miss Bentley came among the first arrivals, bringing Emma sweet crackers and a hymn-book.