“Be you goin’ to get married next month after what you said this mornin’?” her sister asked, half joyfully, half anxiously.

“Yes, I be,” was all Eva replied, and Fanny stared at her; she was so purely normal in her inconsistency as to seem almost the other thing.

The preparations for the wedding went on, but Eva never seemed as happy as she had done before the closing of Lloyd’s.  Jim Tenny could get no more work, and neither could Andrew.

Fanny lamented that the shop had closed at that time of year, for she had planned a Christmas tree of unprecedented splendor for Ellen, but Mrs. Zelotes was to be depended upon as usual, and Andrew told his wife to make no difference.  “That little thing ain’t goin’ to be cheated nohow,” he said one night after Ellen had gone to bed and his visiting companions of the cutting-room had happened in.

“I know my children won’t get much,” Joseph Atkins said, coughing as he spoke; “they wouldn’t if Lloyd’s hadn’t shut down.  I never see the time when I could afford to make any account of Christmas, much as ever I could manage a turkey Thanksgiving day.”

“The poor that the Lord died for can’t afford to keep his birthday; it is the rich that he’s going to cast into outer darkness, that keep it for their own ends, and it’s a blasphemy and a mockery,” proclaimed Nahum Beals.  He was very excited that night, and would often spring to his feet and stride across the room.  There was another man there that night, a cousin of Joseph Atkins, John Sargent by name.  He had recently moved to Rowe, since he had obtained work at McGuire’s, “had accepted a position in the finishing-room of Mr. H. S. McGuire’s factory in the city of Rowe,” as the item in the local paper put it.  He was a young man, younger than his cousin, but he looked older.  He had a handsome face, under the most complete control as to its muscles.  When he laughed he gave the impression of the fixedness of merriment of a mask.  He looked keenly at Nahum Beals with that immovable laugh on his face, and spoke with perfectly good-natured sarcasm.  “All very well for the string-pieces of the bridge from oppression to freedom,” he said, “but you need some common-sense for the ties, or you’ll slump.”

“What do you mean?”

“We ain’t in the Old Testament, but the nineteenth century, and those old prophets, if they were alive to-day, would have to step down out of their flaming chariots and hang their mantles on the bushes, and instead of standing on mountain-tops and tellin’ their enemies what rats they were, and how they would get what they deserved later on, they would have to tell their enemies what they wanted them to do to better matters, and make them do it.”

“Instead of standing by your own strike in Greenboro, you quit and come here to work in McGuire’s the minute you got a chance,” said Nahum Beals, sullenly, and Sargent responded, with his unrelaxing laugh, “I left enough strikers for the situation in Greenboro; don’t you worry about me.”