suicide.  The night before he had watched, turn and turn about, with her mother.  He gave a curious effect of shamefaced and melancholy virtue.  He followed Robert to one side when he was hanging up his hat and coat.  “I’m going to tell you, Mr. Lloyd,” he said, rather awkwardly; “maybe you won’t be interested in the midst of all this, but it all came from the strike.  She’s better this morning, and I’m going to marry her, poor girl.”

Robert looked at him in a dazed fashion.  For a moment he had not the slightest idea what he was talking about.

“I’m going to marry Mamie Brady,” explained Flynn.  “She took laudanum.  It all happened on account of the strike.  I’ll own I’d been flirting some with her, but she’d never done it if she hadn’t been out of work, too.  She said so.  Her mother made her life a hell.  I’m going to marry her, and take her out of it.”

“It’s mighty good of you,” Robert said, rather stupidly.

“There ain’t no other way for me to do,” replied Flynn.  “She thinks the world of me, and I suppose I’m to blame.”

“I hope she’ll make you a good wife and you’ll be happy,” said Robert.

“She thinks all creation of me,” replied Flynn, with the simplest vanity and acquiescence in the responsibility laid upon him in the world.  “That shot wasn’t meant for Mr. Risley,” said Flynn, as Robert approached the office door.  His eyes flashed.  He himself would gladly have been shot for the sake of Ellen Brewster.  He was going to marry, and try to fulfill his simple code of honor, but all his life he would be married to one woman, with another ideal in his heart; that was inevitable.

“I know it wasn’t,” Robert replied, grimly.

“Everything is quiet now,” said Dennison, with his smooth smile.  Robert made no reply, but entered the great work-room.  “He’s mighty stand-offish, now he’s got his own way,” Dennison remarked in a whisper to Nellie Stone.  He leaned closely over her.  Flynn had followed Robert.  The girl glanced up at the foreman, who was unmarried, although years older than she, and her face quivered a little, but it seemed due to a surface sensitiveness.

“I want to know if you’ve heard that Ed is going to marry Mamie Brady, after all,” she whispered.

Dennison nodded.

She knitted her forehead over a column of figures.  Dennison leaned his face so close that his blond-bearded cheek touched hers.  She made a little impatient motion.

“Oh, go long, Jim Dennison,” she said, but her tone was half-hearted.

Dennison persisted, bending her head gently backward until he kissed her.  She pushed him away, but she smiled weakly.

“You didn’t want Ed Flynn.  Why, he’s a Roman Catholic, and you’re Baptist, Nell,” he said.

“Who said I did?” she retorted, angrily.  “Why, I wouldn’t marry Ed Flynn if he was the last man in the world.”

“You’d ’nough sight better marry me,” said Dennison.