She went away, stumbling, because her eyes were blurred with tears, and saying to herself,-- “What _shall_ I do?” She almost ran into Mr. West on Baker Street, and stopped abruptly, putting her hands on his arm, and, in her agitation, shaking it violently, her whole face convulsed and terrified. “Tell me--you know; you are good: whose fault is it? Robert’s--for all--this?” He understood instantly, and was very gentle with her. “My dear Mrs. Eaton, that is a very big question. It isn’t any one man’s fault. It seems strange, but the weather in India may be the reason we are all so wretched in Mercer. Your brother may be forced to make this cut by great laws, which, perhaps, you cannot understand.” “But _we_ go on being warm,” she said, “and it is cold. Oh, those little children had to get warm on the slag! Oh, sir, I don’t believe the Saviour would have been warm while the children were cold!” She looked at him passionately, abruptly applying the precepts of the Founder of his religion. “Ah, well, you know,” William West said kindly, “this whole matter is so enormously complicated”--And then he stammered a little, for, after all, how could he explain to this poor little frightened, ignorant soul that we have learned how injurious to the race would be the literal application of the logic of the Sermon on the Mount? Nowadays the disciple is wiser than his master, and the servant more prudent than his Lord; we know that to feed the five thousand with loaves and fishes, without receiving some equivalent, would be to pauperize them. But of course Mrs. Eaton could not be made to understand that. The clergyman quieted her, somehow; perhaps just by his gentle pitifulness; or else her reverence for him silenced her. She did not ask him any more questions; and there was no one else to ask, except her brother, and just now it would have been hard to find the chance to ask Robert Blair anything. The strike had slowly involved all the mills owned by a syndicate of which he was chairman. He had to go to South Bend, where the great smelting furnaces are; he was mobbed there, though with no worse results than the unpleasantness of eggs and cabbage stalks; still, the wickedness of those dreadful creatures was something too awful, Mrs. Blair said, crying with anger and fright over the newspaper account. At still another mill town a ghastly box reached him, labeled: “Starved by the Blair syndicate.” Robert Blair paled and sickened at its contents, but he swore under his breath: “Let them starve their brats, if they want to; it isn’t my business. There’s work for them if they want it; but the curs would rather loaf. This country can go to the devil before I’ll give in to them!”