Again she went away, her face falling into lines of care. But William West never thought of the matter again. Indeed, he had no time to think of his quiet almoner; those were alarming days in Mercer. The echoes of that storm which shook not only the town, but the very State and nation, are still rolling and muttering in the dark places of the land. Another strike had begun in October. As for the deep and far-reaching causes, the economic and industrial necessities, the vast plans of organizations and trusts, they have no place in this statement of the way in which one ignorant woman regarded their effects--a woman living quietly in her brother’s house, doing her work, expending her little charities, trying to relieve the dreadful misery of those wintry days, with about as much success as a child who plays beside some terrific torrent and tries to dam it with his tiny bank of twigs and pebbles. Robert Blair’s sister had no economic or ethical theories; she had only an anguished heart at the suffering in that dreary mill town, a dreadful bewilderment at its contrast with the untouched luxury of her brother’s house. That she should find a child in one of the tenements dying at its mother’s barren breast, while her own children fared sumptuously every day; that a miserable man should curse her because her brother was robbing him of work, and warmth, and decency, even, while she must bless that same brother for what he was giving her, was a dreadful puzzle. As she understood the situation, this misery existed because her brother would no longer give even fourteen cents an hour to human beings who had to stand half naked in the scorch of intense furnaces, reeking with sweat, taking a breathless moment to plunge waist deep into tanks of cold water; to men who worked where the crash of exploding slag or the accidental tipping of a ladle might mean death; to gaunt and stunted creatures, hollow-eyed, with bleared and sodden faces, whose incessant toil to keep alive had crushed out the look of manhood, and left them silent, hopeless, brutish, with only one certainty in their stupefied souls: “_men don’t grow old in the mills_.” ... That these things should be, while she was clothed in soft raiment bought by wealth which these desperate beings had helped to create--meant to this ignorant woman that there was something wrong somewhere. It was not for her to say what or where. She had no ambition to reform the world. She did not protest against the “unearned increment,” nor did she have views as to “buying labor in the cheapest market.” She did not know anything about such phrases. The only thing that concerned her was whether she, living on her brother’s money, had any part or lot in the suffering about her? She grew nervous and haggard and more distrait and literal than ever. She wished she dared lay her troubles before the wise, gentle, strong man who, to her, was all that was good and great. But it did not seem to her right to criticise her brother