an turned restlessly on her pallet. The big,
awkward, ill-favoured old man stood with his disproportionately long
arms hanging by his sides, staring at her, unaware that his presence
half undid the good the leaping flames were doing her.

"I wish't Uncle Pros was sitting right over there, t'other side the
fire," murmured Laurella dreamily. "How is Pros, Johnnie?"

For nobody understood, as the crazed man in the hospital might have
done, that Laurella's bodily illness was but the cosmic despair of the
little girl who has broken her doll. It had been the philosophy of this
sun-loving, butterfly nature to turn her back on things when they got
too bad and take to her bed till, in the course of events, they bettered
themselves. But now she had emerged into a bleak winter world where
Uncle Pros was not, where Johnnie was powerless, and where she had been
allowed by an unkind Providence to work havoc with her own life and the
lives of her little ones; and her illness was as the tears of the girl
with a shattered toy.

The children in their broken shoes and thin, ill-selected clothing,
shivered on the roads between house and mill, and gave colour to the
statement of many employers that they were better off in the thoroughly
warmed factories than at home. But the factories were a little too
thoroughly warmed. The operatives sweated under their tasks and left the
rooms, with their temperature of eighty-five, to come, drenched with
perspiration, into the chill outside air. The colds which resulted were
always supposed to be caught out of doors. Nobody had sufficient
understanding of such matters to suggest that the rebreathed,
superheated atmosphere of the mill room was responsible.

Deanie, who had never been sick a day in her life, took a heavy cold and
coughed so that she could scarcely get any sleep. Johnnie was
desperately anxious, since the lint of the spinning room immediately
irritated the little throat, and perpetuated the cold in a steady,
hacking cough, that cotton-mill workers know well. Pony was from the
first insubordinate and well-nigh incorrigible--in short, he died hard.
He came to Johnnie again and again with stories of having been cursed
and struck. She could only beg him to be good and do what was demanded
without laying himself liable to punishment. Milo, the serious-faced
little burden bearer, was growing fast, and lacked stamina. Beneath the
cotton-mill regime, his chest was getting dreadfully hollow. He