During the three weeks that followed Tom kept busy day and night,—by day looking for work and talking to chance-met members, by night stirring the members to appear on the first Wednesday of April to vote for the demand for higher wages. He was much of the time dogged by part of the entertainment committee, but he had become watchful, and the knowledge that he was armed made them wary, so day after day passed without another conflict. At first his committee's delay in the discharge of their duty stirred Foley's wrath. "Youse're as slow as fat angels!" he informed them in disgust. Later the delay stirred his anxiety, and he raised his offer from twenty-five dollars a man to one hundred.
Every night Tom was met at his street door by Petersen and left there by him a few hours later. His frequent appearance with Tom brought Petersen into some prominence; and he was promptly nicknamed "Babe" by a facetious member who had been struck by his size, and "Rosie" by a man who saw only his awkwardness. Both names stuck. His relation to Tom had a more unpleasant result: it made the story of his discomfiture by a man of half his size, while on the fire-house job, decidedly worth the telling; and so it rapidly came into general circulation, and the sight of Petersen was the signal for jeers, even among Tom's own friends. Petersen flushed at the taunts, but bore them dumbly and kept his arms at his side.
All this while Ruth was much in Tom's mind. Had it not been that he kept himself busy he could have done little else but think of her. As it was, he lay awake long hours at night, very quietly that he might not rouse his wife, in wide-eyed dreams of her; and several times by day he caught himself out of thoughts of her to find himself in a street far out of his way. And once, in the evening, he had puzzled the faithful Petersen by walking back and forth through an uptown block and gazing at a house in which no member of the Iron Workers' Union could possibly be living. But he held firmly to the course he had recognized as his only course.
For three weeks he maintained his determination, against desire scarcely less strong than his strength, till the evening of the first Tuesday of April, the night before the vote upon the strike. Then, either he was weaker, or desire was stronger. He was overwhelmed. His resolve to keep away from her, his intention to spend this last evening in work, were nothing before his wish to see her again. He was fairly swept up to her door, not heeding Petersen, and not giving a thought to Jake, whom he glimpsed once in the street car behind when a brief blockade let it gain the tail of his own.
"You needn't wait for me," he said mechanically to Petersen as he rang the bell. Again the maid brought back word for him to come up. This time Ruth was not waiting him at the head of the stairs. He stood before her door a moment, with burning brain, striving for mastery over himself, before he could knock. She called to him to enter, and he found her leaning against her little case of books, unusually pale, but with eyes brighter than he had ever seen them.
She took a step toward him, and held out her hand. "I'm so glad you called, Mr. Keating."
Tom, for his part, could make no answer; his throat had suddenly gone cracking dry. He took her hand; his grip was as loose as an unconscious man's.
As was the first minute, so were the two hours that followed. In answer to her questions he told her of his new plans, without a vestige of enthusiasm; and presently, to save the situation, she began to talk volubly about nothing at all. They were hours of mutual constraint. Tom hardly had knowledge of what he said, and he hardly heard her words. His very nearness to her made more ruthlessly clear the wideness that lay between them. He felt with its first keenness the utter hopelessness of his love. Every moment that he sat with his hot eyes upon her he realized that he should forthwith go. But still he sat on in a silence of blissful agony.
At length there came an interruption—a knock at the door. Ruth answered it, and when she turned about she held out an envelope to Tom. "A letter for you," she said, with a faint show of surprise. "A messenger brought it."