nt on their faces, showing only unmeaning pale patches, telling
nothing of what she still feared, and doubted, and craved vainly to know.
Then she sank down into a crouching attitude in the big arm-chair, her
eyes-wide open and staring out at the red lights from the furnaces that
flickered in the sky. An hour after she was still there, her attitude
scarcely changed.

The oppressive stillness of the evening weighed heavily upon Raut. They
went side by side down the road in silence, and in silence turned into the
cinder-made byway that presently opened out the prospect of the valley.

A blue haze, half dust, half mist, touched the long valley with mystery.
Beyond were Hanley and Etruria, grey and dark masses, outlined thinly by
the rare golden dots of the street lamps, and here and there a gas-lit
window, or the yellow glare of some late-working factory or crowded
public-house. Out of the masses, clear and slender against the evening
sky, rose a multitude of tall chimneys, many of them reeking, a few
smokeless during a season of "play." Here and there a pallid patch and
ghostly stunted beehive shapes showed the position of a pot-bank or a
wheel, black and sharp against the hot lower sky, marked some colliery
where they raise the iridescent coal of the place. Nearer at hand was the
broad stretch of railway, and half-invisible trains shunted--a steady
puffing and rumbling, with every run a ringing concussion and a rhymthic
series of impacts, and a passage of intermittent puffs of white steam
across the further view. And to the left, between the railway and the
dark mass of the low hill beyond, dominating the whole view, colossal,
inky-black, and crowned with smoke and fitful flames, stood the great
cylinders of the Jeddah Company Blast Furnaces, the central edifices of
the big ironworks of which Horrocks was the manager. They stood heavy and
threatening, full of an incessant turmoil of flames and seething molten
iron, and about the feet of them rattled the rolling-mills, and the
steam-hammer beat heavily and splashed the white iron sparks hither and
thither. Even as they looked, a truckful of fuel was shot into one of the
giants, and the red flames gleamed out, and a confusion of smoke and black
dust came boiling upwards towards the sky.

"Certainly you get some colour with your furnaces," said Raut, breaking a
silence that had become apprehensive.

Horrocks grunted. He stood with his hands in his pockets, frowning down a