Mr. Marsden had come in. Lyddie kept her eyes carefully on her looms. The room shook and shuddered into life. Lyddie and the Irish girl beyond kept Brigid’s looms going between them as best they could. She was almost busy enough to suppress her fears. And then a young man, the agent’s clerk in his neat suit and cravat, appeared at her side and asked her to come with him to the agent’s office. The time had come at last. She shut down her own looms and one of Brigid’s, and followed the clerk down the stairs and out across the yard to the low building that housed the counting room and the offices.

The agent Graves was seated at his huge rolltop desk and did not at once turn from his papers and acknowledge her presence. The clerk had only taken her as far as the door, so she stood just inside as he closed it behind her. She tried to breathe.

She waited like that, hardly able to get a breath past her Adam’s apple, until she began to feel quite faint. Would she collapse then in a heap on the rug? She studied the pattern, shades of dull browns, starting nearly black in the center and spinning out lighter and lighter to a dirty yellow at the outer edge. Dizzy, she stumbled a step forward to keep from falling. The man turned in his chair, as though annoyed. He was wearing half spectacles and he lowered his massive head and stared over them at her.

“You—you sent for me, sir?” It came out like a hen cackle.

“Yes?”

“You sent for me, sir.” She was glad to hear her voice grow stronger. The man kept staring as though she were a maggot on his dish. “Lydia Worthen, sir. You sent for me.”

“Ah, yes, Miss Worthen.” He neither stood nor asked her to sit down. “Miss Worthen.” He gathered the papers he had been working on and tamped the bottom of the pile on his desk to neaten it, and then laid the stack down on the right side of the desk. Then he scraped his chair around to face her more directly. “Miss Worthen. I’ve had a distressing interview with your overseer this morning.”

She couldn’t help but wonder how Mr. Marsden had retold last night’s encounter.

“It seems,” he continued, “it seems you are a troublemaker in the weaving room.” He was studying her closely now, as closely as he had studied his papers before. “A troublemaker,” he repeated.

“I, sir?”

“Yes. Mr. Marsden fears you are having a bad influence on the other girls there.”

So there had been no report of last night. That, at least, seemed clear. “I do my work, sir,” Lyddie said, gathering courage. “I have no intention of causing trouble on the floor.”

“How long have you been with us, Miss Worthen?”

“A year, sir. Last April, sir.”