After the collection was made, before anyone moved to go, Mary Jane
walked up the aisle to Mr. Millings.

'I love you,' she said.


Chapter II

Nobody sympathised with Mary Jane.

'So unfortunate for Mr. Millings,' every one said; 'such a promising
young man.'

Mary Jane was sent away to a great manufacturing city of the
Midlands, where work had been found for her in a cloth factory. And
there was nothing in that town that was good for a soul to see. For
it did not know that beauty was to be desired; so it made many
things by machinery, and became hurried in all its ways, and boasted
its superiority over other cities and became richer and richer, and
there was none to pity it.

In this city Mary Jane had had lodgings found for her near the
factory.

At six o'clock on those November mornings, about the time that, far
away from the city, the wildfowl rose up out of the calm marshes and
passed to the troubled spaces of the sea, at six o'clock the factory
uttered a prolonged howl and gathered the workers together, and
there they worked, saving two hours for food, the whole of the
daylit hours and into the dark till the bells tolled six again.