a
guttural drawl, and kept on with his work, but there was a meaning
in his words for the pretty girl, who had coquetted with him before
taking up with Jim Tenny.

"That is so," said another man at Jim Tenny's right. "She is right
to come out as she has done when she is so anxious for the child."
This man was a fair-haired Swede, and he spoke English with a
curious and careful precision, very different from the hurried,
slurring intonations of the other men. He had been taught the
language by a philanthropic young lady, a college graduate, in whose
father's family he had lived when he first came to America, and in
consequence he spoke like a gentleman and had some considerable
difficulty in understanding his companions.

"Eva Loud has had a damned hard time, take it all together," spoke
out another man, looking over is bench at the girl on the street. He
was small and thin and wiry, a mass of brown-coated muscles under
his loose-hanging gingham shirt. He plied feverishly his
cutting-knife with his lean, hairy hands as he spoke. He was
accounted one of the best and swiftest cutters in Lloyd's, and he
worked unceasingly, for he had an invalid wife and four children to
support. Now and then he had to stop to cough, then he worked
faster.

"That's so," said the first man.

"Yes, that is so," said the Swede, with a nod of his fair head.

"And now to lose this young one that she set her life by," said the
first girl, with an evident point of malice in her tone, and a
covert look at the pretty girl at Jim Tenny's side. Jim Tenny paled
under his grime; the hand which held the knife clinched.

"What do you s'pose has become of the young one?" said the first
girl. "There's a good many out from the shop huntin' this mornin',
ain't there?"

"Fifty," said the first man, laconically.

"You three were out all day yesterday, wa'n't you?"

"Yes, Jim and Carl and me were out till after midnight."

"Well, I wonder whether the poor little young one is alive? Don't
seem as if she could be--but--"

"Look there! look there!" screamed the elderly girl suddenly. "Look
at _there!_" She began to dance, she laughed, she sobbed, she waved
her lean hands frantically out of the window, leaning far over the
bench. "Look at there!" she kept crying. Then she turned and ran out
of the room, with the other girls and half the cutting-room after
her.

"Damn it, she's got the child!" said the thin man. He kept on
working, his dark, sinewy