"Oh!" said Cally, staring bewildered at her cousin. "Why--where are the Works--from here, I mean ...?"
Hen's strange look, confirmed her own confused conviction that she was appearing at an annoying disadvantage all at once. And forebodings possessed her, as of one walking wide-eyed into unsuspected perils.
"You are lost, Cally, indeed. Why, my dear, we're right on the corner of Seventeenth and Canal now--they're leaning right up against your nose. There!"
Following Hen's nod, Cally's gaze rested again on the somewhat displeasing pile on the corner, this time with a seeing eye. Her fascinated stare took in with one sweep a dirty ramshackle building of weather-worn gray brick, spilling over the sidewalk and staggering away (as it looked) down the littered side-street: rather a small building, obviously old, certainly not fragrant, quite sinister-looking somehow....
The girl felt as if the skies were falling. She perceived that there was some mistake. "Oh ... You mean that is part of them? But the--the main part, I suppose, is--"
"No, this is all there is of 'em, Cally!" said Hen, suddenly with a kind note in her voice. And she waved upward toward a wire screen atop the ancient building, where large black letters spelled out:
THE HETH CHEROOT WORKS
"Is that the Works?" breathed the daughter of the Works, with a sort of stunned incredulity.
In her utter bewilderment, she was confused into glancing at Jack Dalhousie's friend, who stood silent upon the sidewalk, two yards away. Thus she surprised his translucent eyes fixed upon her with a look which she had seen there on two other remembered occasions. The eager confidence had, indeed, faded from his face, but not as she had designed that it should fade. The man had the grace to look away at once, seeming embarrassed: but in one glance she saw that he had read to the heart of what she felt, thus discovering the real birthplace of her Family. And his eyes had said to her, quite plainly, that of course he would not on any account ask her to stop now; and that, on the whole, God must pity her again for a poor little thing who did not even know where and how her own father made his money....
She could have cried for the angry mortification of this moment, but perhaps that confrontation steadied her as nothing else could have done. She said hurriedly, but with some degree of naturalness: