poor fellow
that I am here----"

"Because you think he needs help--and that you can help him?"

But she held back once more. "Please tell me about him first," she said,
walking on.

Amherst met the request with another question. "I wonder how much you
know about factory life?"

"Oh, next to nothing. Just what I've managed to pick up in these two
days at the hospital."

He glanced at her small determined profile under its dark roll of hair,
and said, half to himself: "That might be a good deal."

She took no notice of this, and he went on: "Well, I won't try to put
the general situation before you, though Dillon's accident is really the
result of it. He works in the carding room, and on the day of the
accident his 'card' stopped suddenly, and he put his hand behind him to
get a tool he needed out of his trouser-pocket. He reached back a little
too far, and the card behind him caught his hand in its million of
diamond-pointed wires. Truscomb and the overseer of the room maintain
that the accident was due to his own carelessness; but the hands say
that it was caused by the fact of the cards being too near together, and
that just such an accident was bound to happen sooner or later."

Miss Brent drew an eager breath. "And what do _you_ say?"

"That they're right: the carding-room is shamefully overcrowded. Dillon
hasn't been in it long--he worked his way up at the mills from being a
bobbin-boy--and he hadn't yet learned how cautious a man must be in
there. The cards are so close to each other that even the old hands run
narrow risks, and it takes the cleverest operative some time to learn
that he must calculate every movement to a fraction of an inch."

"But why do they crowd the rooms in that way?"

"To get the maximum of profit out of the minimum of floor-space. It
costs more to increase the floor-space than to maim an operative now and
then."

"I see. Go on," she murmured.

"That's the first point; here is the second. Dr. Disbrow told Truscomb
this morning that Dillon's hand would certainly be saved, and that he
might get back to work in a couple of months if the company would
present him with an artificial finger or two."

Miss Brent faced him with a flush of indignation. "Mr. Amherst--who gave
you this version of Dr. Disbrow's report?"

"The manager himself."

"Verbally?"

"No--he showed me Disbrow's letter."

For a moment or two they walked on silently through the quiet street;
then she said, in