Suddenly he whirled round in his desk chair and held out the letter to the priest.  His hand shook and his face was as pale as ashes.

“What is it?  What’s the matter?” cried the startled old man, who had hardly followed the first pious salutations of his own letter to their end.  “Read it to me yourself, Dan; is there any trouble?”

“Orders—­I’ve got orders to start up; we’re going to start—­I wrote them last week—­”

But the agent had to spring up from his chair and go to the window next the river before he could steady his voice to speak.  He thought it was the look of the moving water that made him dizzy.  “We’re going to start up the mills as soon as I can get things ready.”  He turned to look up at the thermometer as if it were the most important thing in the world; then the color rushed to his face and he leaned a moment against the wall.

“Thank God!” said the old priest devoutly.  “Here, come and sit down, my boy.  Faith, but it’s good news, and I’m the first to get it from you.”

They shook hands and were cheerful together; the foreign letter was crammed into Father Daley’s pocket, and he reached for his big cane.

“Tell everybody as you go up the street, sir,” said Dan.  “I’ve got a hurricane of things to see to; I must go the other way down to the storehouses.  Tell them to pass the good news about town as fast as they can; ’twill hearten up the women.”  All the anxious look had gone as if by magic from the agent’s face.

Two weeks from that time the old mill bell stopped tolling for the slow hours of idleness and rang out loud and clear for the housekeepers to get up, and rang for breakfast, and later still for all the people to go in to work.  Some of the old hands were gone for good and new ones must be broken in in their places, but there were many familiar faces to pass the counting-room windows into the mill yard.  There were French families which had reappeared with surprising promptness, Michel and his pretty daughter were there, and a household of cousins who had come to the next tenement.  The agent stood with his hands in his pockets and nodded soberly to one group after another.  It seemed to him that he had never felt so happy in his life.

“Jolly-looking set this morning,” said one of the clerks whose desk was close beside the window; he was a son of one of the directors, who had sent him to the agent to learn something about manufacturing.

“They’ve had a bitter hard summer that you know nothing about,” said the agent slowly.

Just then Mrs. Kilpatrick and old Mary Cassidy came along, and little Maggie was with them.  She had got back her old chance at doffing and the hard times were over.  They all smiled with such blissful satisfaction that the agent smiled too, and even waved his hand.