The loft seemed strangely the same, strangely different--fresh painted,
polished, smelling new and with changed details. For a few moments Joe
felt the sharp shock of the fire again, especially when he heard the
trembling of the hat factory overhead ... and that noon the bright faces
and laughter in the hallway! It seemed unreal; like ghosts revisiting;
and he learned later that the first morning the hat factory had set to
work, some of the girls had become hysterical.

But as he stood in his private office, looking out into the gray loft,
and feeling how weird and swift are life's changes, the men turned on
the electrics, and the floors and walls began their old trembling and
the presses clanked and thundered. He could have wept. To Joe this
moment of starting up had always been precious: it had seemed to bring
him something he had missed; something that fitted like an old shoe and
was friendly and familiar. All at once he felt as if he could not leave
this business, could not leave these men.

And yet he had only three days with them to wind up the business and
install Marty Briggs. And then there was a last supper of Joe Blaine and
his men. Those days followed one another with ever-deepening gloom, in
which the trembling printery and all the human beings that were part of
it seemed steeped in a growing twilight. Do what Joe would and could in
the matter of good-fellowship, loud laughter, and high jocularity, the
darkness thickened staggeringly. Hardly had Joe settled the transfer of
the printery to Marty, when the rumor of the transaction swept the
business. At noon men gathered in groups and whispered together as if
some one had died, and one after another approached Joe with a:

"Mr. Joe, is it true what the fellows say?"