CHAPTER XVII

THE WOMAN OF THE CROSS-ROADS

The night came down slowly. There was no moon, the stars were few, but a
mellow warmth was in the air. At the window of her little sitting-room
up-stairs Faith sat looking out into the stillness. Beneath was the
garden with its profusion of flowers and fruit; away to the left was the
common; and beyond-far beyond--was a glow in the sky, a suffused light,
of a delicate orange, merging away into a grey-blueness, deepening into
a darker blue; and then a purple depth, palpable and heavy with a
comforting silence.

There was something alluring and suggestive in the soft, smothered
radiance. It had all the glamour of some distant place of pleasure and
quiet joy, of happiness and ethereal being. It was, in fact, the far-off
mirror of the flaming furnace of the great Heddington factories. The
light of the sky above was a soft radiance, as of a happy Arcadian land;
the fire of the toil beneath was the output of human striving, an
intricate interweaving of vital forces which, like some Titanic machine,
wrought out in pain--a vast destiny.

As Faith looked, she thought of the thousands beneath struggling and
striving, none with all desires satisfied, some in an agony of want and
penury, all straining for the elusive Enough; like Sisyphus ever rolling
the rock of labour up a hill too steep for them.

Her mind flew to the man Kimber and his task of organising labour for its