of Old Ben.

GLEN would have been very lonely in the months which followed if it had not been for her increased activities with the mill workers, and her joy in her transformed house, for she saw less and less of Luke Manders.

She had to fight a feeling of disappointment which bordered sometimes on resentment: Luke’s advancement, instead of knitting them more closely together, seemed rather to come between them and force them apart. He was so absorbedly, relentlessly busy! Glen, unhappy over the way in which he drove the hands, had to admit that he drove himself most cruelly of all, and the hardest thing she had to bear was her helplessness to help him. She was bewildered by the fact that her duties, in spite of the tremendous pressure under which the mill was being run, were lighter than ever before. She longed ardently to lift burdens from him, but he constantly assumed more and more of the work which she had[126] been in the habit of doing—even taking over the bulk of the correspondence, and taking full charge of certain of the files. When she protested he was adamant; he had to keep the reins in his own hands; he was so pushed he hardly knew whether he was on “foot or horseback,” and it confused him if he didn’t keep his eye on all the details.

[126]

And when she put a hand on his sleeve and said earnestly—“But Luke, I want to help you!” he had an instantaneous transition to the Luke of the lane on her birthday.

“You know how you can help me!” He was almost savage in voice and eyes, in the embrace in which he caught her. “You can help me if you want to—by marrying me! By keeping your promise to your father!”

She was frightened by his vehemence, and still more by her own reaction to it. She took herself firmly in hand; she would not fail him and her father because she was that curious and unfortunate creature, the person who doesn’t like to be touched. “But I will marry you, Luke! I will!”

“When?”

Strong walls closing round about her, closing in, nearer and nearer; so near, so close, so tight, that she could hardly breathe, hardly think. “When—when—when I’m twenty, Luke!”

“The day you’re twenty?”

[127]“The day—I’m twenty!”

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