"You see I have chosen to make my home in Littleton, and I want to be one with you. I want to be helpful, as well as to get help."
"Zat ees a good way to feel. Littleton—zet ees our new name, I hear. It do sound strange to me yet. We nevare haf a name before. It was just the Vorks."
"Do you like the name?"
"Eh, what matters?" flinging out her hands in a way that proved her Parisian blood and birth. "It will do as well as any other, Littleton—Lavillotte—How strange that your name does mean 'the little town,' also! Did you know?"
"Does it?" Joyce felt it was time to flee. This Frenchwoman was too keen to be easily answered. She nodded brightly, perhaps at the question, perhaps to say adieu, and crying back over her shoulder, "Remember my request!" hurried away, laughing within herself at her narrow escape.
CHAPTER XVI.
ON A TRAIL.
Dan Price was not a guest either opening night at the social house. On the contrary, the first evening, the events of which have been related, he took his dinner pail and tackle, and despite the somewhat showery state of the atmosphere, pedaled out of the settlement towards his woodland haunt as fast as will and muscle could carry him. He had a supreme contempt for all these new "notions" at the Works, which he looked upon as the somewhat crazy hobbies of a man too young to realize what they meant, and too rich to care how he squandered his money. He knew that to go back to the old ways, after a taste of the new, would make that state of slavery seven times worse than before. Better let them alone in what they had become used to; and, for his own part, he wanted no patronizing, he told himself, nor anybody laying down the law as to how he should spend his leisure, either. Out of hours he was his own master, at least, and nobody need interfere. There were things in life worse than physical hardships—experience had sternly taught him that.
He would scarcely fling a glance in the direction of the well-lighted building, towards which already the younger tide of humanity was setting, and his dark face took on a sneer when he noted their evident excitement over the event.