"Not yet. In a day or so she'll be downstairs."

"You might tell her I've been asking about her."

There was something in Joel's voice that caught Willy Cameron's
attention. He thought about Joe a great deal that night. Joe was another
one who must never know about Edith's trouble. The boy had little
enough, and if he had built a dream about Edith Boyd he must keep his
dream. He was rather discouraged that night, was Willy Cameron, and he
began to think that dreams were the best things in life. They were a
sort of sanctuary to which one fled to escape realities. Perhaps no
reality was ever as beautiful as one's dream of it.

Lily had passed very definitely out of his life. Sometimes during his
rare leisure he walked to Cardew Way through the warm night, and past
the Doyle house, but he never saw her, and because it did not occur to
him that she might want to see him he never made an attempt to call.
Always after those futile excursions he was inclined to long silences,
and only Jinx could have told how many hours he sat in his room at
night, in the second-hand easy chair he had bought, pipe in hand and
eyes on nothing in particular, lost in a dream world where the fields
bore a strong resemblance to the parade ground of an army camp, and
through which field he and Lily wandered like children, hand in hand.

But he had many things to think of. So grave were the immediate
problems, of food and rent, of Mrs. Boyd and Edith, that a little of his
fine frenzy as to the lurking danger of revolution departed from him.
The meetings in the back room at the pharmacy took on a political
bearing, and Hendricks was generally the central figure. The ward felt
that Mr. Hendricks was already elected, and called him "Mr. Mayor." At
the same time the steel strike pursued a course of comparative calm. At
Friendship and at Baxter there had been rioting, and a fatality or two,
but the state constabulary had the situation well in hand. On a Sunday
morning Willy Cameron went out to Baxter on the trolley, and came
home greatly comforted. The cool-eyed efficiency of the state police
reassured him. He compared them, disciplined, steady, calm with the
calmness of their dangerous calling, with the rabble of foreigners who
shuffled along the sidewalks, and he felt that his anxiety had been
rather absurd.

He was still making speeches, and now and then his name was mentioned in
the newspapers. Mrs. Boyd, now mostly confined to her room, spent mu