t him, as if by magic, the
misery of living. Now, she laughed lightly and played a trick with the
quickness of a thoughtless school girl. Besides, how did it happen that
she was so at home in this house of well-to-do people, and so familiar
with this man of a cultured class? Ned did not express his thoughts in
such phrases of course, but that was the effect of them. He had laughed,
but he was still sad and sick at heart and somehow these pleasantries
jarred on him. It looked as if there were some secret understanding
certainly, some bond that he could not distinguish, between the girl of
the people and this courteous gentleman. Nellie had told him simply that
the Strattons were "interested in the Labour movement" and were very
nice, but Stratton spoke of her as "one of the family" and she turned out
his gas and locked one of his own doors in his face. If it was a secret
society, well and good, no matter how desperate its plan. But why did
they laugh and joke and play tricks? He was not in the humour. For the
time his soul abhorred what seemed to him frippery. He sought intuitively
to find relief in action and he began impatiently to look for it here.

"Hurry, Nellie!" cried Stratton. "Coffee's nearly ready."

"You won't touch me?" answered her merry voice.

"No, we'll forgive you this once, but look out for the next time."

She opened the door forthwith and stepped out quickly. Ned caught a
glimpse of a large bedroom through the doorway. She had taken off her hat
and gloves and smoothed the hair that lay on her neck in a heavy plait.
At the collar of the plain black dress that fell to her feet over the
curving lines of her supple figure she had placed a red rose, half blown.
She was tall and straight and graceful, more than beautiful in her strong
fresh womanhood, as much at home in such a house as this as in the
wretched room where he had watched her sewing slop-clothes that morning.
His aching heart went out towards her in a burst of unspoken feeling
which he did not know at the time to be Love.

"Mrs. Stratton always puts a flower for me. She loves roses." So she said
to Ned, seeing him looking astonishedly at her. Then she slipped one hand
inside the arm that Stratton bent towards her, and took hold of Ned's arm
with the other. Stratton turned down the gas. Linked thus together the
three went cautiously down the dim passage hall-way, towards the glass
door through one side of which coloured light came.

"Anybod