till he found a room, far up, flight after flight. Through open doors he
saw here and there aged women or doddering old men who were guardians of
dirty babes who tumbled about on the bare floors.

"Either too old to run a loom or too young to lug a bobbin," Farr
informed himself; "that's why they aren't in the mill."

Old folks and babes stared at him without showing interest.

No one looked at him when he opened the door in which the key fitted.

He stepped in quickly and closed and locked the door behind him.

It was a little room and pitifully bare, and it was under the roof, and
the ceiling slanted across it so sharply that the young man, tall above
the average, was compelled to bow his head.

A little girl, a wraith of a child, pale with the pallor of a prisoner,
hardly more than a toddler, sat on the floor and stared up at the
intruder, frozen, silent, immobile with the sudden, paralyzing terror
that grasps the frightened child. Pathetically poor little playthings
were scattered about her: a doll fashioned from gingham and
cotton-waste, makeshift dishes of pasteboard, a doll-carriage made from
a broken flower-basket with spools for wheels. The man who entered saw
all with one glance and understood that here in this bare room this
child had been compelled to drag out the weary hours alone while the
mother had toiled. Here now the child waited patiently for--for that
water-soaked bundle, with the white, dead face, that lay on the canal
bank waiting for the coroner.