"You wouldn't if you was engaged to Mister Roberts," answered Sarah.

"Of course seeing him every day makes all the difference. And as to work, there's nothing in it, for everybody's got to work at 'The Seven Stars,' I can tell you, and the work's never done there."

"It's the company I should like," declared the other. "I'd give a lot to see new people every day. In a public they come and go, before you've got time to be sick of the sight of 'em. But here, you see the same people and hear the same voices every day of your blessed life; and sometimes it makes me feel right down wicked."

"It's narrowing to the mind I dare say, unless you've got a man like Mister Roberts with a lot of general ideas," admitted Sarah. "But you know very well for that matter you could have a man to-morrow. Benny Cogle's mate is daft for you."

The other sniffed.

"It's very certain he ain't got no general ideas, beyond the steam engine. He can only talk about the water wheel to-day and the boilers to-morrow. When I find a chap, he'll have to know a powerful lot more about life than that chap--and shave himself oftener also."

"He'd shave every day if you took him, same as Mister Roberts does,"

said Sarah.

Elsewhere Mr. Best was starting a run of the Gill Spinner, a machine which took sliver straight from the Drawing Frames and spun it into a large coa.r.s.e yarn. A novice watched him get the great machine to work, make all ready and then, at a touch, connect it with the power and set it crashing and roaring. Its voice was distinctive and might be heard by a practised ear above the prevailing thunder.

Then came Mrs. Nelly Northover to this unfamiliar scene, peeped in at a door or two and failed to see Sarah, who laboured at the other end of the Mill. But the hostess of 'The Seven Stars' knew Sabina Dinnett and now shook hands with her and then stood and watched in bewildered admiration before a big frame of a hundred spindles.

Sabina was spinning with a heart very full of happiness. On the previous evening she had promised to wed Raymond Ironsyde, and her thoughts to-day were winged with over-mastering joy. For life had turned into a glorious triumph; the man who had asked her to marry him was not only a gentleman, but far above the power of any wrong-doing. She knew in the very secret places of her soul, that he could never act away from his honest and n.o.ble character; that he was a knight above reproach, incapable of wronging any living thing. There was an element of risk for most girls who fell in love with those better born than themselves; but none for her. Other men might deceive and abuse, and suffer outer influences to chill their love, when the secret of it became known; but not this man. His rare nature had been revealed to her; he desired the welfare of all people; he was moved with nothing but the purest principles and loftiest feeling. He would not willingly have brought sorrow to a child. And she had won this unique spirit! He loved her with the love that only such a man was great enough to show; and she echoed it and knew that such a pa.s.sion must be unchanging, everlasting, built not only to make their united lives unspeakably happy and gloriously content, but to run over also into the lives of others, less blessed, and leave the sad world happier for their happiness. There was not a cloud in the sky of her romance and she shared with him for the moment the joy of secrecy. But that would not be long. They had determined to hug their delicious knowledge for a little while and then proclaim the great tidings to the world.

So she followed the old road, along which her sisters had tramped from immemorial time, and would still tramp through the generations to come, when her journey was ended and the wonderful country of man's love explored--its oases visited, its antres endured.

Now Sabina played priestess to the Spinning Machine--a monster reared above her, stupendous and insatiable.

Along the summit of the Spinning Frame, just within reach of tall Sabina's uplifted hand, there perched a row of reels from which the finished material descended through series of rollers. The retaining roller aloft gave it to the steel delivery roller which drew the thin, sad-looking stuff with increased speed downward. And here at its moment of most shivering tenuity, when the perfected and purified material seemed reduced to an extremity of weakness, came the magic change.

Unseen in the whirring complexity of the spinner, it received the momentous gift that translates fibre to yarn. In a moment it changed from stuff a baby's finger could break to thread capable of supporting fifteen pounds of pressure. For now came the twist--that word of mighty significance--and the tiny thread of new-born yarn descended to the spindle, vanished in the whirl of the flier and reappeared, an accomplished miracle, winding on the bobbin beneath.

Upon the spindle revolved the flier--a fork of steel with guide eye at one leg of the fork--and through the guide eye came the twisted yarn to wind on the bobbin below. There, as the bobbin frame rose and fell, the thread was perfectly delivered to the reel and coiled off layer by layer upon it.

Mrs. Northover stared to see the nature of a Spinner's duties and the ease with which she controlled the great, pulsing, roaring frame of a hundred spindles. Sabina's eyes were everywhere; her hands were never still; her feet seemed to dance a measure to the thunder of the Frame.

Now she marked a roving reel aloft that was running out, and in a moment she had broken the sliver, swept away the empty reel and hung up a full one. Then she drew the new sliver down to the point of the break and, in a moment, the two merged and the thread ran on. Now her fingers touched the spindles, as a musician touches the keys, and at a moment's pressure the machine obeyed and the yarn flew on its way obedient. Now she cleared a snarl, or catch, where a spindle appeared to have run amuck or created hopeless confusion; now she readjusted the weights that kept a drag on the humming bobbins. Her twinkling hands touched and calmed and fed the monster. She knew its whims, corrected its errors, brought to her insensate machine the complement of brain that made it trustworthy.

And when the bobbins were all full, she hastened along the Frame, turned off the driving power and silenced the huge activity in a moment. Then, like lightning, she cut her hundred threads and lifted the bobbins from their spindles until she had a pile upon her shoulder. In a marvellously short time she had doffed the bobbins and set up a hundred empty ones.

Then the cut threads were readjusted, the power turned on and all was motion again.

Sabina had never calculated her labours, until Raymond took the trouble to do so; then she learned a fact that astonished her. He found that it took a hundred and fifty minutes to spin one thousand and fifty yards; and as each spindle spun two and a half miles in ten hours, her daily accomplishment was two hundred and fifty miles of yarn.

"You spin from seventy to eighty thousand miles of single yarn a year,"

he told her, and the fact expressed in these terms amazed her and her sister spinners.

Now Nelly Northover praised the performance.

"To think that you slips of girls can do anything so wonderful!" she said. "We talk of the spinners of Bridport as if they were n.o.bodies; but upon my conscience, Sabina, I never will again. I've always thought I was a pretty busy woman; but I'd drop to the earth I'm sure after an hour of your job, let alone ten hours."

Sabina laughed.

"It's use, Mrs. Northover. Some take to it like a duck to water. I did for one. But some never do. If you come to the Frame frightened, you never make a spinner. They're like humans, the Spinning Frames; if they think you're afraid of them, they'll always bully you, but if you show them you're mistress, it's all right. They have their moods and whims, just as we have. They vary, and you never know how the day will go.

Sometimes everything runs smoothly; sometimes nothing does. Some days you're as fresh at the end as the beginning; some days you're dog-tired and worn out after a proper fight."

"There's something hungry and cruel and wicked about 'em to my eye,"

declared Mrs. Northover.

"We're oftener in fault than the Frames, however. Sometimes the spinner's to blame herself--she may be out of sorts and heavy-handed and slow on her feet and can't put up her ends right, or do anything right; and often it's the fault of the other girls and the 'rove' comes to the spinner rough; and often, again, it's just luck--good or bad. If the machine always ran perfect, there'd be nothing to do. But you've got to use your wits from the time it starts to the time it stops."

"The creature would best me every time," said the visitor, regarding Sabina's machine with suspicion and something akin to dislike.

The spinner stopped a fouled spindle and rubbed her hand.

"Sometimes the yarn's always snarling and your drag weights are always burning off and the stuff is full of kinks and the sliver's badly pieced up--that's the drawing minder's fault--and a bad drawing minder means work for me. Your niece, Sarah, is a very good drawing minder, Mrs.

Northover. Then you'll get ballooning, when the thread flies round above the flier, and that means too little strain on the jamb and the bobbin has got to be tempered. And often it's too hot, or else too cold, for hemp and flax must have their proper temperature. But to-day my machine is as good and kind as a nice child, that only asks to be fed and won't quarrel with anybody."

Mrs. Northover, however, saw nothing to praise, for Sabina's speech had been broken a dozen times.

"If that's what you call working kindly, I'd like to see the wretch in a nasty mood," she said. "I lay you want to slap it sometimes."

Sabina was mending a drag that had burned off. The drags were heavy weights hanging from strings that pressed upon the side of the bobbins and controlled their speed. The friction often burned these cords through and the weights had to be lifted and retied again and again.

"We want a clever invention to put this right," she said. "A lot of good time's wasted with the weights. n.o.body's thought upon the right thing yet."

"I'm properly dazed," confessed Nelly Northover. "You live and learn without a doubt--nothing's so true as that."

Her niece had seen her and approached, as the machinery began to still for the dinner-hour.

"Morning, Sarah. Can you do such wonders as Miss Dinnett?" she asked.

"No, Aunt Nelly. I'm a spreader minder. But I'll be a spinner some day, if Mr. Roberts likes for me to stop, here after I'm married."

"Sarah would soon learn to spin," declared Sabina.

Then she turned to bid Raymond Ironsyde good morning. His brother was away from Bridport on a tour with one of his travellers, that he might become acquainted with many of his more important customers. Raymond, therefore, felt safe and was wasting a good deal of his time. He had brought a basket of fruit from North Hill House--a present from Estelle--and he began to dispense plums and pears as the women streamed away to dinner.

They knew him very well now and treated him with varying degrees of familiarity. Early doubts had vanished, and they took him as a good natured, rather 'soft' young man, who meant well and was friendly and harmless. The ill-educated are always suspicious, and Levi Baggs declared from the first that Raymond was nothing better than his brother's spy, placed here for a time to inquire into the ambitions and ideas of the workers and so help the firm to combat the lawful demands of those whom they employed; but this theory was long exploded save in the mind of Mr. Baggs himself. The people of Bridetown Mill held Raymond on their side, and all were secretly interested to know what would spring of his frank friendship with Sabina.

In serious moments Raymond felt uneasy at the relations he had established with the workers, and Mr. Best did not hesitate to warn him again and again that discipline was ill served by such easy terms between employer and employed; but his moments of perspicuity were rare, for now his mind and soul were poured into one thought and one only. He was riotously happy in his love affair and could not pretend to his fellow creatures anything he did not feel. Always amiable and accessible, his romance made him still more so, and he was const.i.tutionally unable at this moment to take a serious view of anything or anybody.

One ray of hope, however, Mr. Best recognised: Raymond did show an honest and genuine interest in the machines. He had told the foreman that he believed the great problem lay there, and where machinery was concerned he could be exceedingly intelligent and rational. This trait in him had a bearing on the future and, in time to come, John Best remembered its inception and perceived how it had developed.

Now, his fruit dispensed, Raymond talked with Sabina about the Spinning Frame and instructed Mrs. Northover, who was an acquaintance of his, in its mysteries.

"These are old-fashioned frames," he declared, "and I shan't rest till I've turned them out of the works and got the latest and best. I'm all for the new things, because they help the workers and give good results.

In fact, I tell my brother that he's behind the times. That's the advantage of coming to a subject fresh, with your mind unprejudiced.

Daniel's all bound up in the past and, of course, everything my father did must be right; but I know better. You have to move with the times, and if you don't you'll get left."

"That's true enough, Mr. Ironsyde, whatever your business may be,"

answered Mrs. Northover.

"Of course--look at 'The Seven Stars.' You're always up to date, and why should my spinners--I call them mine--why should they have to spin on machines that come out of the ark, when, by spending a few thousand, they could have the latest?"

"You've got to balance cost against value," answered the innkeeper. "It don't do to dash at things. One likes for the new to be tried on its merits first, and then, if it proves all that's claimed for it, you go in and keep abreast of the times according; but the old will often be found as good as the new; and so Mr. Daniel no doubt looks before he leaps."

"That's cowardly in my opinion," replied Raymond. "You must take the chances. Of course if you're frightened to back your judgment, then that shows you're a second cla.s.s man with a second cla.s.s sort of mind; but if you believe in yourself, as everybody does who is any good, then you go ahead, and if you come a purler now and again, that's nothing, because you get it back in other ways. I'm not frightened to chance my luck, am I, Sabina?"