Ten days have passed and I have neither seen nor heard from Selwyn.


I have often wondered, on waking winter mornings in my very warm bed,
how it would feel to go out in the gray dawn of a new day and hurry
off to work. Now I know.

For more than a week I have been up at five forty-five, and at
six-thirty have been hurrying with Lucy Hobbs, who lives around the
corner, to the overalls-factory, where she is a forewoman. It is
dark and cold and raw at half-past six on a winter morning, and the
sunrise is very different from what it is in summer.

Each morning as I started out with Lucy, and hurried down street
after street, I watched the opening doors of the shabby, dull-looking
houses we passed with keen interest. Ash-cans and garbage-pails were
in front of many of them, and through unshuttered windows a child
could occasionally be seen with its face pressed against the pane,
waiting to wave good-by to some one who was leaving. Out of the
doors of these houses came men and women and boys and girls, who
hurried as we hurried, and with a word to some, a wave of her
uplifted hand to others, a blank stare at others again, Lucy seemed
leading a long procession. Around each corner and from every car
that passed came more "Hands," and each morning when the factory was
reached a crowd that jammed its entrance and extended half a block up
and down the street was waiting for the opening of the door, out of
which it would not come until darkness fell again.

For the first day or two I was noticed with indifference on the part
of some, resentment on the part of others, but on the third day, as I