"I'm real sorry I said that, Frank, I am sure. You see, I was just teasing. Guess I didn't think—except about poor Monica. You see, dear, she's so—so ill, and I don't think she'll ever get better. That's partly why I sent for you. When this—this trouble comes I'm half afraid it'll kill her."
The man's resentment had utterly died out. In its place was a terrible, straining anxiety and grief.
"Kill her? Oh, Phyl, you can't—you don't mean that. Surely she is not so ill as all that. Surely you're just troubled, and fancy that. How—how can any labor trouble hurt her. It can't. There will be no trouble if Hendrie is—reasonable. That is what Leyburn said. He promised me that."
"Promised you?" said the girl quickly. Her mind was wide open and watchful. This boy was all the world to her.
"Yes, yes. He promised me before I accepted this work. Oh, you don't understand. You can't. We want the employers to realize their responsibilities. We want them to make the lives of those who toil for them happier and better. We want them to give them a fair wage, and let them enjoy life instead of keeping them crushed beneath the grindstone of their labor. Hendrie, I believe, will do this. Then—there can be no trouble that can hurt Monica."
Phyllis gazed out ahead and nodded.
"You, too, feared your work might hurt Monica," she said, "or you would not have made him promise—that."
Frank started. He knew that fear had been in his mind. Was still in it. But Phyllis did not wait for an answer. She turned at once to him, and her beautiful eyes were very tender as she beheld the pucker of anxious thought between his brows.
"Men are so queer," she said, with a quaint little twisted smile. "I'd say they aren't a bit like women in—some things. Say, dear, I guess it wouldn't hurt you just a little bit if I'd set right out to carry on a war against everything that belonged to your life. It wouldn't hurt you to think your son had just got right to work to make you do things that you couldn't see the justice of. It wouldn't hurt you, no matter how he told you he was your friend, if he acted the way of an enemy. To a woman that just seems dreadful. It's like your own child, the child you've done all you could to help—when he's helpless, the child you've never been too ill, or too tired to nurse and fix right, the child you'd be ready any time to give your life for, just turning right around and hitting you in the face when—when you're helpless. It doesn't matter if trouble comes or not, you're leading the folks against your Monica. While she's abed sick to death, and can't help herself, you're—you're just going to hit her in the face. Maybe it's not just only in the face. Maybe it's her poor, tired heart, that's been crying these nights and nights for sight of you."
"Phyl! Phyl! For God's sake don't talk that way," Frank burst out, a great, passionate grief in his honest eyes. "You make me out the cruelest monster living. Can't I convince you of the rightness of all I want to do? Monica? I'd give my life a hundred times to help her. I love her as never mother was loved. I would not hurt her, not a hair of her head."