sion when, on the day following Antonelli's advent, these strangers
arrived from nowhere to install themselves--with no baggage to speak of
--in Hampton's more modest but hitherto respectable hostelries. And no
sooner had the city been rudely awakened to the perilous presence, in
overwhelming numbers, of ignorant and inflammable foreigners than these
turned up and presumed to lead the revolt, to make capital out of it, to
interpret it in terms of an exotic and degenerate creed. Hampton would
take care of itself--or else the sovereign state within whose borders it
was would take care of it. And his Honour the Mayor, who had proclaimed
his faith in the reasonableness of the strikers, who had scorned the
suggestions of indignant inhabitants that the Governor be asked for
soldiers, twenty-four hours too late arranged for the assembly of three
companies of local militia in the armory, and swore in a hundred extra
police.

The hideous stillness of Fillmore Street was driving Janet mad. What she
burned to do was to go to Boston and take a train for somewhere in the
West, to lose herself, never to see Hampton again. But--there was her
mother. She could not leave Hannah in these empty rooms, alone; and
Edward was to remain at the mill, to eat and sleep there, until the
danger of the strike had passed. A messenger had come to fetch his
clothes. After leaving Ditmar in the office of the mill, Janet crept up
the dark stairs to the flat and halted in the hallway. Through the open
doorway of the dining-room she saw Hannah seated on the horsehair sofa
--for the first time within memory idle at this hour of the day. Nothing
else could have brought home to her like this the sheer tragedy of their
plight. Until then Janet had been sustained by anger and excitement, by
physical action. She thought Hannah was staring at her; after a moment it
seemed that the widened pupils were fixed in fascination on something
beyond, on the Thing that had come to dwell here with them forever.

Janet entered the room. She sat down on the sofa and took her mother's
hand in hers. And Hannah submitted passively. Janet could not speak. A
minute might have passed, and the silence, which neither had broken,
acquired an intensity that to Janet became unbearable. Never had the room
been so still! Her glance, raised instinctively to the face of the
picture-clock, saw the hands pointing to ten. Every Monday morning, as
far back as she could recall, her father had w