around the place with a grin of Contempt.

"Cut it short," he ordered. "Clear out."

"There's my bicycle," Aaron Thurnbrein said slowly.

They all looked at him--the woman and the man with nervous anxiety, the
official with a flicker of interest Aaron Thurnbrein drew a little sigh.
The bicycle bad been earned by years of strenuous toil. It was almost a
necessity of his existence.

"Aaron's bicycle," David Ross muttered. "No, no! That must not be.
Let us go to the streets."

But the woman did not move. Already the young man had wheeled it into
the shop.

"Take it," he insisted. "What does it matter? Maraton is here!"

Away again, this time on foot, along the sun-baked pavements, through
courts and alleys into a narrow, busy street in the neighbourhood of
Shoreditch. He stopped at last before a factory and looked tentatively
up at the windows. Through the opened panes came the constant click of
sewing machines, the smell of cloth, the vision of many heads bent over
their work. He stood where he was for a time and watched. The place
was like a hive of industry. Row after row of girls were there, seated
side by side, round-shouldered, bending over their machines, looking
neither to the right nor to the left, struggling to keep up to time to
make sure of the wage which was life or death to them. It was nothing
to them that above the halo of smoke the sky was blue; or that away