"And what about the shirt-factory?"
"That's all right, too," he said, though his face grew a little clouded. "I shall have twenty sewing-machines in full swing by the middle of April. The manager was here and dined with me last Thursday; he's a fine fellow. He assures me that, after the initial expenses are over, the girls can earn from eight to ten shillings a week easily."
"By Jove! That's good. That will be a great help to the poor people."
"Yes; he sends the shirts here, ready and cut for sewing, by the new system of scientific shirt-making. Then all they have to do is to tack them together with the machines."
"God bless you!" I said fervently. "You're a wonderful fellow."
I was sorry that I gave him Ormsby's message of warning.
CHAPTER XX
MADONNA MIA
The winter had nearly rolled by, and the sky was opening out its eyelids wider and wider, and letting in light to man and all his wondrous train of servitors. It was a cold, steely light indeed, particularly on those March evenings; and the sunsetting was a dreary, lonesome thing, as the copper-colored rays rested on hamlet or mountain, or tinged the cold face of the sea. But it was light, and light is something man craves for, be it never so pale. Will not one of heaven's delights be to see the "inaccessible light" in which God—our God—is shrouded, and to behold one another's faces in the light that streams from the Lamb? And so, very tempting as my fire is—and I am as much a fire-worshipper as an Irish Druid or a Peruvian Inca—I always like to go out as the days are lengthening and the sun is stretching out his compasses to measure in wider arcs the sky.