The uproar subsided, the flooding steel became bluer, a solid stream curving into the black depths of the ladle.  Vapours of green and sulphur and lilac shivered into the denser ruby smoke and rising silver spray.  Polder called a warning into Mariana’s ear, they drew back as a lump of coal was heaved up from the pit, into the ladle.  A dull vermilion blaze followed, and Howat Penny partly heard an explanation—­“recarburizing.”  He could now see the steel bubbling up to the rim of the container.  Men, Polder said shortly, had fallen in....  Utterly unthinkable.  With a sudorific heat that drove them still farther back the slag boiling on the steel flowed in a gold cascade over a great lip into a second receptacle below.  That was soon filled, and gorgeous streams and pools widened across the riven ground.  The steel itself escaped in a milky incandescence.  “A wild heat,” James Polder told them, pleased.  “The bottom of a furnace may drop out.  I was almost caught in the pit at Cambria.”  The crane chains swung forward, picked up the ladle of molten metal, and shifted it through the air to a position over a circular group of moulds.  There, a valve opened, the steel poured into a central pipe.  “Bottom-filled,” Polder concluded, assisting Mariana over the precarious flooring; “the metal rises into the ingot forms.”

They descended again, by the blackened brick, box-like office of the superintendent, to the level of the pit, retraced the way over the boardwalk.  They passed a cavernous interior, filled with a continuous crashing, where a great sheet of flushing steel was propelled over a system of rollers through a black, dripping compression.  “I can take you to the Senate,” James Polder told them, once more outside; “or the Engineers’ Society.  Dinner will be ready at the club.”

He conducted them into the serious interior of a large, solidly constructed dwelling that had been transformed into a club.  The dining room was already filling but they secured a small table against the wall.  Across the floor ten or twelve men were gathered in a circle.  Some, Howat thought, were surprisingly young for the evident authority in their manner, pronouncements; others were grey, weatherworn, men with immobile faces often lost, in the middle of a gay period, in a sudden gravity of thought, silent calculation.  He saw the smooth, deft hands of draughtsmen, and scarred, powerful hands that, like James Polder’s, had laboured through apprenticeship in pit and mill shop.

He recognized that Polder was more drawn than he had first observed.  He was sapped by the crushing entity of the steel works, the enormous heat and energy and strain of the open hearth.  If the younger did not lay off he would, unquestionably, break.  Nevertheless, Howat was totally unprepared for the amazing suggestion quietly advanced by Mariana.  “Jimmy,” she said, “couldn’t you come to Shadrach for those two weeks?  You’d find the quiet there wonderful.  And any doctor will advise you to leave your family for a proper rest.  I’m certain Howat would be as nice as possible.”