ell--well--what do you say, Tredegar?" murmured Mr. Langhope, allured
by her last argument; and Bessy, clasping her hands, summed up
enthusiastically: "And I shall understand so much better without a lot
of people trying to explain to me at once!"

Her sudden enthusiasm surprised no one, for even Mrs. Ansell, expert as
she was in the interpreting of tones, set it down to the natural desire
to have done as quickly as might be with Hanaford.

"Mrs. Westmore has left her little girl at home," she said to Amherst,
with a smile intended to counteract the possible ill-effect of the
impression.

But Amherst suspected no slight in his employer's eagerness to visit
Westmore. His overmastering thought was one of joy as the fulness of his
opportunity broke on him. To show her the mills himself--to bring her
face to face with her people, unhampered by Truscomb's jealous
vigilance, and Truscomb's false explanations; to see the angel of pity
stir the depths of those unfathomable eyes, when they rested, perhaps
for the first time, on suffering that it was in their power to smile
away as easily as they had smiled away his own distrust--all this the
wonderful moment had brought him, and thoughts and arguments thronged so
hot on his lips that he kept silence, fearing lest he should say too
much.

IV

JOHN AMHERST was no one-sided idealist. He felt keenly the growing
complexity of the relation between employer and worker, the seeming
hopelessness of permanently harmonizing their claims, the recurring
necessity of fresh compromises and adjustments. He hated rant, demagogy,
the rash formulating of emotional theories; and his contempt for bad
logic and subjective judgments led him to regard with distrust the
panaceas offered for the cure of economic evils. But his heart ached
for the bitter throes with which the human machine moves on. He felt the
menace of industrial conditions when viewed collectively, their
poignancy when studied in the individual lives of the toilers among whom
his lot was cast; and clearly as he saw the need of a philosophic survey
of the question, he was sure that only through sympathy with its
personal, human side could a solution be reached. The disappearance of
the old familiar contact between master and man seemed to him one of the
great wrongs of the new industrial situation. That the breach must be
farther widened by the ultimate substitution of the stock-company for
the individual employer--a fact ob