“Oh, but I couldn’t learn another,” interrupted Margaret, with nervous precipitation, as she rose hurriedly to her feet, “so soon as this, you know! Why, you’ve just cast me off as a niece, and it takes time for me to realize the full force of that blow,” she finished gayly, as she hurried away.
In her own room she drew a deep breath of relief; but all day, and for many days afterward, she was haunted by the hurt look in Ned’s eyes as she had turned away. It reminded her of the expression she had seen once in the pictured eyes of a dog that had been painted by a great artist. She remembered, too, the title of the picture: “Wounded in the house of his friends,” and it distressed her not a little; and yet—Ned was her comrade and her very good friend, and that was what he must be.
Not only this, however, caused Margaret restless days and troubled nights: there were those children down in the mills—those little children, nine, ten, twelve years old. It was too cold now to stay long on the veranda; but there was many a day, and there were some nights, when Margaret looked out of the east windows of Hilcrest and gazed with fascinated, yet shrinking eyes at the mills.
She was growing morbid—she owned that to herself. She knew nothing at all of the mills, and she had never seen a child at work in them; yet she pictured great black wheels relentlessly crushing out young lives, and she recoiled from the touch of her trailing silks—they seemed alive with shrunken little forms and wasted fingers. Day after day she turned over in her mind the most visionary projects for stopping those wheels, or for removing those children beyond their reach. Even though her eyes might be on the merry throngs of a gay city street—her thoughts were still back in the mill town with the children; and even though her body might be flying from home at the rate of thirty or forty miles an hour in Frank’s big six-cylinder Speeder, her real self was back at Hilcrest with the mills always in sight.
Once again she appealed to her guardian, but five minutes’ talk showed her the uselessness of anything she could say—it was true, she did not know anything about it.
It was that very fact, perhaps, which first sent her thoughts in a new direction. If, as was true, she did not know anything about it, how better could she remedy the situation than by finding out something about it? And almost instantly came the memory of her guardian’s words: “I suppose that that altogether too officious young McGinnis has been asking your help for some of his schemes.”
Bobby knew. Bobby had schemes. Bobby was the one to help her. By all means, she would send for Bobby!
That night, in a cramped little room in one of the mill boarding-houses, a square-jawed, gray-eyed young man received a note that sent the blood in a tide of red to his face, and made his hands shake until the paper in his long, sinewy fingers fluttered like an aspen leaf in a breeze. Yet the note was very simple. It read:
“Will you come, please, to see me to-morrow night? I want to ask some questions about the children at the mills.”
And it was signed, “Margaret Kendall.”