"I will not!" he said doggedly.
He turned down the road sullenly. A great desire was on him to catch the next car and intercept her at a changing-station.
"Stop making a fool o' yourself," he said to himself. "You 'll do no such thing."
He plugged on steadily, unmindful of where he was going. He was aboil with perturbation.
"I ha'e gi'en them a couple o' raises this year a'ready!"
He was blind to everything but the action of the workers of his mill, of his father's mill, of his grandfather's mill, defying him openly and stubbornly. And now they had to take Jeanie Lindsay from him, the only woman he had liked wholly in all his days.
"To hell with them!" he said savagely. His red beard bristled.
He stopped suddenly. He shook his fist at an arc-lamp.
"I 'll close the mill," he muttered aloud. "I 'll close down. I will so. I 've just had enough o' it. They ha'e no softie in Aleck Robe'son. I 'll close it. Be damned but I will! I will! I will so!"
From Aleck Robertson's earliest infancy he had been bred to the mill, as his father had been by his father before him. It is a small, compact building, off the Falls Road, the Robertson mill is, harboring not more than four hundred employees. But their fame is not in Belfast alone. Many the royal house in Europe before the war had its bride's linen from the Robertson factory. It is a small mill, as it should be, with a small door, and on a by-street is the lintel with the name "Robert Robertson & His Son, Founded 1803."