CHAPTER V.
A STRANGE NEW HOME
Lena May’s clasp on the hand of her older sister grew unconsciously tighter as they passed a noisy tobacco factory which faced the East River and loomed, smoke-blackened and huge.
The old Pensinger mansion was just beyond, set far back on what had once been a beautiful lawn, reaching to the river’s edge, but which was now hard ground with here and there a half-dead tree struggling to live without care. A wide road now separated it from the river, which was lined as far up and down as one could see with wharves, to which coal and lumber barges were tied.
The house did indeed look as though it were a century old. The windows had never been boarded up, and many of the panes had been broken by stones thrown by the most daring of the street urchins, though, luckily, few dared go near enough to further molest the place for fear of stirring up the “haunt.”
“A noble house gone to decay,” Gloria said. She had to speak louder than usual because of the pounding and whirring of the machinery in the neighboring factory. Lena May wondered if anywhere in all the world there were still peaceful spaces where birds sang, or where the only sound was the murmuring of the wind in the trees.
“Is it never still here?” she turned big inquiring eyes toward their guide.
“Never,” Miss Selenski told her. “That is, not for more than a minute at a time, between shifts, for when the day work stops the night work begins.”
“Many of the workers are women, are they not?” Gloria was looking at the windows of the factory where many foreign women could be seen standing at long tables.
“They leave their children at the Settlement House. They work on the day shift, and the men, if they can be made to work at all, go on at night.”
“Oh, Gloria!” this appealingly from the youngest, “will we ever be able to sleep in the midst of such noise, when we have been used to such silent nights at home?”