If Jessica had heard these reports, she might have traced at once to its source Miss Minster’s sudden and inexplicable coolness. Not hearing them, she felt grieved and perplexed for a time, and then schooled herself into resignation as she recalled Reuben Tracy’s warning about the way rich people took up whims and dropped them again, just as fancy dictated. It was on the first day of November that the popular rumor as to Horace’s prospects reached her, and this was a day memorable for vastly more important occurrences in the history of industrial Thessaly. The return of cold weather had been marked, among other signs of the season, by a renewed disposition on the part of Ben Lawton to drop in to the millinery shop, and sit around by the fire in the inner room. Ben came this day somewhat earlier than usual--the midday meal was in its preliminary stages of preparation under Lucinda’s red hands--and it was immediately evident that he was more excited over something that had happened outside than by his expectation of getting a dinner. “There’s the very old Nick to pay down in the village!” he said, as he put his feet on the stove-hearth. “Heard about it, any of you?” Ben had scarcely ascended in the social scale during the scant year that had passed, though the general average of whiteness in his paper collars had somewhat risen, and his hair and straggling dry-mud-colored beard were kept more duly under the subjection of shears. His clothes, too, were whole and unworn, but they hung upon his slouching and round-shouldered figure with “poor white” written in every misfitting fold and on every bagging projection. Jessica had resigned all hope that he would ever be anything but a canal boatman in mien or ambition, but her affection for him had grown rather than diminished; and she was glad that Lucinda, in whom there had been more marked personal improvements, seemed also to like him better. No, Jessica said, she had heard nothing. “Well, the Minster furnaces was all shut down this morning, and so was the work out at the ore-beds at Juno, and the men, boys, and girls in the Thessaly Company’s mills all got word that wages was going to be cut down. You can bet there’s a buzz around town, with them three things coming all together, smack!” “I suppose so,” answered Jessica, still bending over her work of cleaning and picking out some plumes. “That looks bad for business this winter, doesn’t it?” Ben’s relations with business, or with industry generally, were of the most remote and casual sort, but he had a lively objective interest in the topic. “Why, it’s the worst thing that ever happened,” he said, with conviction. “There’s seven hundred men thrown out already” (the figure was really two hundred and twelve), “and more than a thousand more got to git unless they’ll work for starvation wages.”