“Will you send the coach-driver to this side of the mills?” asked Kirby, turning to Wolfe.

He spoke kindly:  it was his habit to do so.  Deborah, seeing the puddler go, crept after him.  The three men waited outside.  Doctor May walked up and down, chafed.  Suddenly he stopped.

“Go back, Mitchell!  You say the pocket and the heart of the world speak without meaning to these people.  What has its head to say?  Taste, culture, refinement?  Go!”

Mitchell was leaning against a brick wall.  He turned his head indolently, and looked into the mills.  There hung about the place a thick, unclean odor.  The slightest motion of his hand marked that he perceived it, and his insufferable disgust.  That was all.  May said nothing, only quickened his angry tramp.

“Besides,” added Mitchell, giving a corollary to his answer, “it would be of no use.  I am not one of them.”

“You do not mean”—­said May, facing him.

“Yes, I mean just that.  Reform is born of need, not pity.  No vital movement of the people’s has worked down, for good or evil; fermented, instead, carried up the heaving, cloggy mass.  Think back through history, and you will know it.  What will this lowest deep—­thieves, Magdalens, negroes—­do with the light filtered through ponderous Church creeds, Baconian theories, Goethe schemes?  Some day, out of their bitter need will be thrown up their own light-bringer,—­their Jean Paul, their Cromwell, their Messiah.”

“Bah!” was the Doctor’s inward criticism.  However, in practice, he adopted the theory; for, when, night and morning, afterwards, he prayed that power might be given these degraded souls to rise, he glowed at heart, recognizing an accomplished duty.

Wolfe and the woman had stood in the shadow of the works as the coach drove off.  The Doctor had held out his hand in a frank, generous way, telling him to “take care of himself, and to remember it was his right to rise.”  Mitchell had simply touched his hat, as to an equal, with a quiet look of thorough recognition.  Kirby had thrown Deborah some money, which she found, and clutched eagerly enough.  They were gone now, all of them.  The man sat down on the cinder-road, looking up into the murky sky.

“’T be late, Hugh.  Wunnot hur come?”

He shook his head doggedly, and the woman crouched out of his sight against the wall.  Do you remember rare moments when a sudden light flashed over yourself, your world, God? when you stood on a mountain-peak, seeing your life as it might have been, as it is? one quick instant, when custom lost its force and every-day usage? when your friend, wife, brother, stood in a new light? your soul was bared, and the grave,—­a foretaste of the nakedness of the Judgment-Day?  So it came before him, his life, that night.  The slow tides of pain he had borne gathered themselves up and surged against his soul.  His squalid daily life, the brutal coarseness eating into his brain, as the ashes into his skin:  before, these things had been a dull aching into his consciousness; to-night, they were reality.  He griped the filthy red shirt that clung, stiff with soot, about him, and tore it savagely from his arm.  The flesh beneath was muddy with grease and ashes,—­and the heart beneath that!  And the soul?  God knows.