The rain did not cease.  Clarke and the reporter left the mills; the others, comfortably seated near the furnace, lingered, smoking and talking in a desultory way.  Greek would not have been more unintelligible to the furnace-tenders, whose presence they soon forgot entirely.  Kirby drew out a newspaper from his pocket and read aloud some article, which they discussed eagerly.  At every sentence, Wolfe listened more and more like a dumb, hopeless animal, with a duller, more stolid look creeping over his face, glancing now and then at Mitchell, marking acutely every smallest sign of refinement, then back to himself, seeing as in a mirror his filthy body, his more stained soul.

Never!  He had no words for such a thought, but he knew now, in all the sharpness of the bitter certainty, that between them there was a great gulf never to be passed.  Never!

The bell of the mills rang for midnight.  Sunday morning had dawned.  Whatever hidden message lay in the tolling bells floated past these men unknown.  Yet it was there.  Veiled in the solemn music ushering the risen Saviour was a key-note to solve the darkest secrets of a world gone wrong,—­even this social riddle which the brain of the grimy puddler grappled with madly to-night.

The men began to withdraw the metal from the caldrons.  The mills were deserted on Sundays, except by the hands who fed the fires, and those who had no lodgings and slept usually on the ash-heaps.  The three strangers sat still during the next hour, watching the men cover the furnaces, laughing now and then at some jest of Kirby’s.

“Do you know,” said Mitchell, “I like this view of the works better than when the glare was fiercest?  These heavy shadows and the amphitheatre of smothered fires are ghostly, unreal.  One could fancy these red smouldering lights to be the half-shut eyes of wild beasts, and the spectral figures their victims in the den.”

Kirby laughed.  “You are fanciful.  Come, let us get out of the den.  The spectral figures, as you call them, are a little too real for me to fancy a close proximity in the darkness,—­unarmed, too.”

The others rose, buttoning their overcoats, and lighting cigars.

“Raining, still,” said Doctor May, “and hard.  Where did we leave the coach, Mitchell?”

“At the other side of the works.—­Kirby, what’s that?”

Mitchell started back, half-frightened, as, suddenly turning a corner, the white figure of a woman faced him in the darkness,—­a woman, white, of giant proportions, crouching on the ground, her arms flung out in some wild gesture of warning.

“Stop!  Make that fire burn there!” cried Kirby, stopping short.

The flame burst out, flashing the gaunt figure into bold relief.

Mitchell drew a long breath.

“I thought it was alive,” he said, going up curiously.

The others followed.

“Not marble, eh?” asked Kirby, touching it.