"You may step one side," answered the other--"but you'll step back into
line again. I know you better than you know yourself, Mary."

There was silence in the little cabin. The winds of an early fall
shrilled outside, and life suddenly seemed to Hal a stern and merciless
thing. He had thought in his youthful fervour it would be thrilling to
be a revolutionist; but to be an ant, one of millions and millions, to
perish in a bottomless ditch--that was something a man could hardly
bring himself to face! He looked at the bowed figure of this white
haired toiler, vague in the feeble lamplight, and found himself thinking
of Rembrandt's painting, the Visit of Emmaus: the ill-lighted room in
the dirty tavern, and the two ragged men, struck dumb by the glow of
light about the forehead of their table-companion. It was not fantastic
to imagine a glow of light about the forehead of this soft-voiced old
man!

"I never had any hope it would come in my time," the old man was saying
gently. "I did use to hope my boys might see it--but now I'm not sure
even of that. But in all my life I never doubted that some day the
working-people will cross over to the promised land. They'll no longer
be slaves, and what they make won't be wasted by idlers. And take it
from one who knows, Mary--for a workingman or woman not to have that
faith, is to have lost the reason for living."

Hal decided that it would be safe to trust this man, and told him of his
check-weighman plan. "We only want your advice," he explained,
remembering Mary's warning. "Your sick wife--"

But the old man answered, sadly, "She's almost gone, and I'll soon be
following. What little strength I have left might as well be used for