The two old companions had locked their brooms into a three-cornered closet at the stair-foot and were crossing the mill yard together.  They were so much slower than the rest that they could only see the very last of the crowd of mill people disappearing along the streets and into the boarding-house doors.  It was late autumn, the elms were bare, one could see the whole village of Farley, all its poverty and lack of beauty, at one glance.  The large houses looked as if they belonged to a toy village, and had been carefully put in rows by a childish hand; it was easy to lose all sense of size in looking at them.  A cold wind was blowing bits of waste and paper high into the air; now and then a snowflake went swiftly by like a courier of winter.  Mary Cassidy and Mrs. Kilpatrick hugged their old woolen shawls closer about their round shoulders, and the little girl followed with short steps alongside.

II.

The agent of the mills was a single man, keen and business-like, but quietly kind to the people under his charge.  Sometimes, in times of peace, when one looks among one’s neighbors wondering who would make the great soldiers and leaders if there came a sudden call to war, one knows with a flash of recognition the presence of military genius in such a man as he.  The agent spent his days in following what seemed to many observers to be only a dull routine, but all his steadiness of purpose, all his simple intentness, all his gifts of strategy and powers of foresight, and of turning an interruption into an opportunity, were brought to bear upon this dull routine with a keen pleasure.  A man in his place must know not only how to lead men, but how to make the combination of their force with the machinery take its place as a factor in the business of manufacturing.  To master workmen and keep the mills in running order and to sell the goods successfully in open market is as easy to do badly as it is difficult to do well.

The agent’s father and mother, young people who lived for a short time in the village, had both died when he was only three years old, and between that time and his ninth year he had learned almost everything that poverty could teach, being left like little Maggie to the mercy of his neighbors.  He remembered with a grateful heart those who were good to him, and told him of his mother, who had married for love but unwisely.  Mrs. Kilpatrick was one of these old friends, who said that his mother was a lady, but even Mrs. Kilpatrick, who was a walking history of the Corporation, had never known his mother’s maiden name, much less the place of her birth.  The first great revelation of life had come when the nine-years-old boy had money in his hand to pay his board.  He was conscious of being looked at with a difference; the very woman who had been hardest to him and let him mind her babies all the morning when he, careful little soul, was hardly more than