he went from one room to another up through the ascending
stories, he had a vague sensation of being followed. Some shadow
lurked at times behind the engines, or stole after him in the
dark entries. Were there ghosts, then, in mills in broad
daylight? None but the ghosts of Want and Hunger and Crime, he
might have known, that do not wait for night to walk our streets:
the ghosts that poor old Knowles hoped to lay forever.

Holmes had a room fitted up in the mill, where he slept. He went
up to it slowly, holding the paper tightly in one hand, glancing
at the operatives, the work, through his furtive half-shut eye.
Nothing escaped him. Passing the windows, he did not once look
out at the prophetic dream of beauty he had left without. In the
mill he was of the mill. Yet he went slowly, as if he shrank
from the task waiting for him. Why should he? It was a simple
matter of business, this transfer of Knowles's share in the mill
to himself; to-day he was to decide whether he would conclude the
bargain. If any dark history of wrong lay underneath, if this
simple decision of his was to be the struggle for life and death
with him, his cold, firm face told nothing of it. Let us be just
to him, stand by him, if we can, in the midst of his desolate
home and desolate life, and look through his cold, sorrowful eyes
at the deed he was going to do. Dreary enough he looked, going
through the great mill, despite the power in his quiet face. A
man who had strength for solitude; yet, I think, with all his
strength, his mother could not have borne to look back from the
dead that day, to see her boy so utterly alone. The day was the
crisis of his life, looked forward to for years; he held in his
hand a sure passport to fortune. Yet he thrust the hour off,
perversely, trifling with idle fancies, pushing from him the one