She flushed at his words as she turned from his desk; and the color remained in her countenance for some time. But it was not a flush of pleasure. Indeed, the expression of her countenance was not at all happy as she closed her desk and left the main office a little later. At the street exit she hesitated; then she went back through the drying and cutting rooms and had John Murphy let her out of the side gate which would not be opened for an hour yet for the exit of the factory hands. She had caught a glimpse of Jim Mayberry sitting in his car out in front. She did not like the superintendent, and for more reasons than one. In the first place, he was one of those men who seem to have no respect at all for girls who worked. Ethel was not sure how well he was received by Mailsburg people whose first thoughts were of society. But Mayberry had a bad reputation among many respectable people. Careful mothers and fathers frowned on his attentions to their daughters. As she turned into Burnaby Street on her way home she saw Frank Barton ahead of her. His military stride was likewise taking him briskly homeward. The girl might have hastened her own steps and joined him; but she hesitated, for that was not like Ethel Clayton. Her association with the handsome general manager of the Hapwood-Diller Manufacturing Company had been entirely on a business footing. The fact that they attended the same church had scarcely brought them together outside the offices of the concern. Barton was well liked by most Mailsburg people. Especially had he been commended for his work of the last two years--since he had been raised to the pinnacle of general manager of the biggest manufacturing concern in the town. Yet there are always carping critics in every place and in any event. As mark the criticism hurled at the young manager from the sidewalk that afternoon as the boys were marching from the National Guard Armory to the railway station. Ethel knew that the suggestion that Barton was a slacker must have hurt the general manager cruelly. She, perhaps as well as anybody else, knew why Frank Barton, trained in the Guard, and a military man from choice, was not marching away with this first quota at the call to arms. If many Mailsburg people looked at Barton in the way suggested by the careless criticism which had lately reached his ears, Ethel Clayton knew that the manager’s existence was going to be a hard one. She did not want to see him go to the war. Indeed, she was by no means inspired as yet with any degree of patriotism. The war was too remote and our reason for entering into it too theoretical. The blood of but few of our men had been shed, and those were, as a rule, such as were connected with the more spectacular portions of the service, nor had our women and children been butchered by the Hun.