if one could look, was there nothing worth reading in this wet, faded thing, half-covered with ashes? no story of a soul filled with groping passionate love, heroic unselfishness, fierce jealousy? of years of weary trying to please the one human being whom she loved, to gain one look of real heart-kindness from him?  If anything like this were hidden beneath the pale, bleared eyes, and dull, washed-out-looking face, no one had ever taken the trouble to read its faint signs:  not the half-clothed furnace-tender, Wolfe, certainly.  Yet he was kind to her:  it was his nature to be kind, even to the very rats that swarmed in the cellar:  kind to her in just the same way.  She knew that.  And it might be that very knowledge had given to her face its apathy and vacancy more than her low, torpid life.  One sees that dead, vacant look steal sometimes over the rarest, finest of women’s faces,—­in the very midst, it may be, of their warmest summer’s day; and then one can guess at the secret of intolerable solitude that lies hid beneath the delicate laces and brilliant smile.  There was no warmth, no brilliancy, no summer for this woman; so the stupor and vacancy had time to gnaw into her face perpetually.  She was young, too, though no one guessed it; so the gnawing was the fiercer.

She lay quiet in the dark corner, listening, through the monotonous din and uncertain glare of the works, to the dull plash of the rain in the far distance,—­shrinking back whenever the man Wolfe happened to look towards her.  She knew, in spite of all his kindness, that there was that in her face and form which made him loathe the sight of her.  She felt by instinct, although she could not comprehend it, the finer nature of the man, which made him among his fellow-workmen something unique, set apart.  She knew, that, down under all the vileness and coarseness of his life, there was a groping passion for whatever was beautiful and pure,—­that his soul sickened with disgust at her deformity, even when his words were kindest.  Through this dull consciousness, which never left her, came, like a sting, the recollection of the dark blue eyes and lithe figure of the little Irish girl she had left in the cellar.  The recollection struck through even her stupid intellect with a vivid glow of beauty and of grace.  Little Janey, timid, helpless, clinging to Hugh as her only friend:  that was the sharp thought, the bitter thought, that drove into the glazed eyes a fierce light of pain.  You laugh at it?  Are pain and jealousy less savage realities down here in this place I am taking you to than in your own house or your own heart,—­your heart, which they clutch at sometimes?  The note is the same, I fancy, be the octave high or low.

If you could go into this mill where Deborah lay, and drag out from the hearts of these men the terrible tragedy of their lives, taking it as a symptom of the disease of their class, no ghost Horror would terrify you more.  A reality of soul-starvation, of living death, that meets you every day under the besotted faces on the street,—­I can paint nothing of this, only give you the outside outlines of a night, a crisis in the life of one man:  whatever muddy depth of soul-history lies beneath you can read according to the eyes God has given you.