But when one o'clock struck, and still no word from the absent pair, Mary's fancies grew more tragic.

By two o'clock she imagined the car overturned at the bottom of some embankment, and both of them badly hurt. At three o'clock she began to have such dire forebodings that she went and woke up Aunt Cordelia, and was on the point of telephoning Wally's mother when the welcome rumbling of a car was heard under the porte cochere. It was Wally and Helen, and though Helen looked pale she had that air of ownership over her apologetic escort which every woman understands.

Mary already divined the end of the story.

"We were coming along all right," said Wally, "and would have been home before ten. But when we were about nine miles from nowhere and going over a bad road, I had a puncture.

"Of course that delayed me a little--to change the wheels--but when I tried to start the car again, she wouldn't go.

"I fussed and fixed for a couple of hours, it seems to me, and then I thought I'd better go to the nearest telephone and have a garage send a car out for us. But Helen, poor girl, was tired and of course I couldn't leave her there alone. So I tackled the engine again and just when I was giving up hope, a car came along.

"They couldn't take us in--they were filled--but they promised to wake up a garage man in the next town and send him to the rescue. It was half past two when he turned up, but it didn't take him long to find the trouble, and here we are at last."

He drew a full breath and turned to Helen.

"Of course I wouldn't have cared a snap," he said, "if it hadn't been for poor Helen here."

"Oh, I don't mind--now," she said.

"I knew it!" thought Mary. "They're engaged..." And though she tried to smile at them both, for some reason which I can never hope to explain, it took an effort. Wally and Helen were still looking at each other.

"Tired, dear?" he asked.

Helen nodded and glanced at Mary with a look that said, "Did you hear him call me 'Dear'?"

"I think if I were you, I'd go to bed," continued Wally, all gentle solicitude. She took an impulsive step toward him. He kissed her.

"We're engaged," he said to Mary.

What Mary said in answer, she couldn't remember herself when she tried to recall it later, for a strange thought had leaped into her mind, driving out everything else.

"I almost hate to ask," she thought. "It would be too dreadful to know."

But curiosity has always been one of mankind's fateful gifts, and at the breakfast table next morning, Mary had Wally to herself.

"Oh, Wally," she said. "What did the garage man find was the trouble with your car?"

"The simplest thing imaginable," he said. "One of the wires leading to the switch on the instrument board had worked loose--that awful road, you know."

"I knew it," Mary quietly told herself, and in her mind she again saw Helen demonstrating how to quell the wildest car on earth. Mary ought to have stopped there, but a wicked imp seemed to have taken possession of her.

"Did Helen cry, when she saw how late it was getting?"

"She did at first," he said, looking very solemn, "but when I told her--"

His confessions were interrupted by Hutchins, who whispered to Mary that she was wanted on the telephone.

"It's Mr. Forbes," he said.

Archey's voice was ringing with excitement when he greeted Mary over the wire.

"Can you come down to the office early this morning?" he asked.

"What's the matter?"

"I just found out that the rest of the men had a meeting last night--and they voted to strike. There won't be a man on the place this morning ...

and I think there may be trouble...."

CHAPTER XXVI

Afterwards, when Mary looked back at the leading incidents of the big strike it wasn't the epic note which interested her the most, although the contest had for her its moments of exaltation.

Nor did her thoughts revert the oftenest to those strange things which might have engrossed the chance observer--work and happiness walking hand in hand, for instance, to the accompaniment of Mrs. Kelly's drum--or woman showing that she can acquire the same dexterity on a drilling machine as on a sewing machine, the same skill at a tempering oven as at a cook stove, the same competence and neatness in a factory as in a house.

Indeed, when all is said and done, the sound of the work which women were presently doing at New Bethel was only an echo of the tasks which women had done during four years of war, and being a repet.i.tion of history, it didn't surprise Mary when she stopped to think it over. But looking back at the whole experience later, these were the two reflections which interested her the most.

"They have always called woman a riddle," she thought. "I wonder if that is because she could never be natural. If woman has been a riddle in the past, I wonder if this is the answer now...."

That was her first reflection.

Her second was this, and in it she unconsciously worded one of the great lessons of life. "The things I worried about seldom happened. It was something which n.o.body ever dreamed of--that nearly ended everything."

And when she thought of that, her breath would come a little quicker and soon she would shake her head, and try to put her mind on something else; although if you had been there I think you would have seen a suspicious moisture in her eye, and if she were in her room at home, she would go to a photograph on the wall-the picture of a gravely smiling girl on a convent portico--signed "With all my love, Rosa."

Still, as you can see, I am running ahead of my story, and so that you may better understand Mary's two reflections and the events which led to them, I will now return to the morning when she received Archey's message that every man in the factory had gone on strike as a protest against the employment of women.

As soon as she reached the office she sent a facsimile letter to the skilled women workers who had applied from out of town.

"If we only get a third of them," she thought, "we'll pull through somehow."

But Mary was reckoning without her book. For one thing, she was unaware of the publicity which her experiment was receiving, and for another thing perhaps it didn't occur to her that the same yearnings, the same longings, the same stirrings which moved her own heart and mind so often--the same vague feeling of imprisonment, the same vague groping for a way out--might also be moving the hearts and minds of countless other women, and especially those who had for the first time in their lives achieved economic independence by means of their labour in the war.

Whatever the reason, so many skilled women journeyed to New Bethel that week, coming with the glow of crusaders, eager to write their names on this momentous page of woman's history, that Mary's worry turned into a source of embarra.s.sment. However, by straining every effort, accommodations were found for the visitors and the work of re-organization was at once begun.

The next six weeks were the busiest, I had almost said the most feverish, in Mary's life.

The day after the big strike was declared, not a single bearing was made at Spencer & Son's great plant. For a factory is like a road of many bridges, and when half of these bridges are suddenly swept away, traffic is out of the question.

So the first problem was to bridge the gaps.

From the new arrivals, fixers, case-hardeners and temperers were set to work--women who had learned their trades during the war.

Also a call was issued for local workers and the "school" was opened, larger than ever. For the first few weeks it might be said that half the factory was a school of intensive instruction; and then, one day which Mary will never forget, a few lonely looking bearings made laborious progress through the plant--only a few, but each one embodying a secret which I will tell you about later.