"We are having a meeting of the Committee," he said, and she smiled.
Despite her agitation, this struck her as humorous. And Rolfe smiled back
at her. "You wouldn't think so, but Antonelli knows how to manage them.
He is a general. Come, I will enlist you, you shall be my recruit."

"But what can I do?" she asked.

"I have been thinking. You said you were a stenographer--we need
stenographers, clerks. You will not be wasted. Come in here."

Behind her two box-like rooms occupying the width of the building had
been turned into offices, and into one of these Rolfe led her. Men and
women were passing in and out, while in a corner a man behind a desk sat
opening envelopes, deftly extracting bills and post-office orders and
laying them in a drawer. On the wall of this same room was a bookcase
half filled with nondescript volumes.

"The Bibliotheque--that's French for the library of the Franco-Belgian
Cooperative Association," explained Rolfe. "And this is Comrade Sanders.
Sanders is easier to say than Czernowitz. Here is the young lady I told
you about, who wishes to help us--Miss Bumpus."

Mr. Sanders stopped counting his money long enough to grin at her.

"You will be welcome," he said, in good English. "Stenographers are
scarce here. When can you come?"

"To-morrow morning," answered Janet.

"Good," he said. "I'll have a machine for you. What kind do you use?"

She told him. Instinctively she took a fancy to this little man, whose
flannel shirt and faded purple necktie, whose blue, unshaven face and
tousled black hair seemed incongruous with an alert, business-like, and
efficient manner. His nose, though not markedly Jewish, betrayed in him
the blood of that vital race which has triumphantly survived so many
centuries of bondage and oppression.

"He was a find, Czernowitz--he calls himself Sanders," Rolfe explained,
as they entered the hall once more. "An Operative in the Patuxent,
educated himself, went to night school--might have been a capitalist like
so many of his tribe if he hadn't loved humanity. You'll get along with
him."

"I'm sure I shall," she replied.

Rolfe took from his pocket a little red button with the letters I.W.W.
printed across it. He pinned it, caressingly, on her coat.

"Now you are one of us!" he exclaimed. "You'll come to-morrow?"

"I'll come to-morrow," she repeated, drawing away from him a little.

"And--we shall be friends?"

She nodded. "I must go now, I think."

"Addio