secret," she
added, fiercely. "You keep your mouth shut about it. She never lived
with him. She left him right off. I wouldn't know it now but the
servants were talking about the house being forbidden to him, and I went
straight to Mademoiselle. I said: 'You keep him away from Miss Lily,
because I know something about him.' It was when I told her that she
said they were married."

She went out and up the stairs, moving slowly and heavily. Edith sat
still, the pan on her knee, and thought. Did Willy know? Was that why he
was willing to marry her? She was swept with bitter jealousy, and added
to that came suspicion. Something very near the truth flashed into her
mind and stayed there. In her bitterness she saw Willy telling Lily of
Akers and herself, and taking her away, or having her taken. It must
have been something like that, or why had she left him?

But her anger slowly subsided; in the end she began to feel that the new
situation rendered her own position more secure, even justified her
own approaching marriage. Since Lily was gone, why should she not marry
Willy Cameron? If what Ellen had said was true she knew him well enough
to know that he would deliberately strangle his love for Lily. If it
were true, and if he knew it.

She moved about the kitchen, making up the fire, working automatically
in that methodless way that always set Ellen's teeth on edge, and
thinking. But subconsciously she was listening, too. She had heard Dan
go into his mother's room and close the door. She was bracing herself
against his coming down.

Dan was difficult those days, irritable and exacting. Moody, too, and
much away from home. He hated idleness at its best, and the strike was
idleness at its worst. Behind the movement toward the general strike,
too, he felt there was some hidden and sinister influence at work, an
influence that was determined to turn what had commenced as a labor
movement into a class uprising.

That very afternoon, for the first time, he had heard whispered the
phrase: "when the town goes dark." There was a diabolical suggestion in
it that sent him home with his fists clenched.

He did not go to his mother's room at once. Instead, he drew a chair to
his window and sat there staring out on the little street. When the town
went dark, what about all the little streets like this one?

After an hour or so of ominous quiet Edith heard him go into his
mother's room. Her hands trembled as she closed her door.