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 beyond the murky horizon, the sun, which here in the narrow street seemed to have drawn all life from the air, was shining on yellow cornfields bending before the west wind. Here there was simply an intolerable heat, a smell of fish and a smell of cloth.
Aaron Thurnbrein crossed the street, entered the unimposing doorway and knocked at the door which led into the busy but unassuming offices. A small boy threw open a little glass window and looked at him doubtfully.
"I don't know that you can see Miss Thurnbrein even for a minute," he declared, in answer to Aaron's confident enquiry. "It's our busiest time. What do you want?"
"I am her brother," Aaron announced. "It is most important."
The boy slipped from a worn stool and disappeared. Presently the door of the little waiting-room was suddenly opened, and a girl entered.
"Aaron!" she exclaimed. "Has anything happened?"