time to strip themselves of the impedimenta of the soul.  Two were left below, and these were brothers who had married but three months before.  They were strong, buoyant men of twenty-five, with life just begun, and home still welcome and alluring—­warm-faced, bonny women to meet them at the door, and lay the cloth, and comfort their beds, and cheer them away to work in the morning.  These four lovers had been the target for the good-natured and half-affectionate scoffing of the whole field; for the twins, Jabez and Jacob, were as alike as two peas, and their wives were cousins, and were of a type in mind, body, and estate.  These twin toilers were left below, with Rudyard Byng forcing his way to the place where they had worked.  With him was one other miner of great courage and knowledge, who had gone with other rescue parties in other catastrophes.

It was this man who was carried to the surface when another small explosion occurred.  He brought the terrible news that Byng, the rescuer of so many, was himself caught by falling timbers and imprisoned near a spot where Jabez and Jacob Holyhoke were entombed.

Word had gone to Glencader, and within an hour and a half Jasmine, Al’mah, Stafford, Lord Tynemouth, the Slavonian Ambassador, Adrian Fellowes, Mr. Tudor Tempest and others were at the pit’s mouth, stricken by the same tragedy which had made so many widows and orphans that night.  Already two attempts had been made to descend, but they had not been successful.  Now came forward a burly and dour-looking miner, called Brengyn, who had been down before, and had been in command.  His look was forbidding, but his face was that of a man on whom you could rely; and his eyes had a dogged, indomitable expression.  Behind him were a dozen men, sullen and haggard, their faces showing nothing of that pity in their hearts which drove them to risk all to save the lives of their fellow-workers.  Was it all pity and humanity?  Was there also something of that perdurable cohesion of class against class; the powerful if often unlovely unity of faction, the shoulder-to-shoulder combination of war; the tribal fanaticism which makes brave men out of unpromising material?  Maybe something of this element entered into the heroism which had been displayed; but whatever the impulse or the motive, the act and the end were the same—­men’s lives were in peril, and they were risking their own to rescue them.

When Jasmine and her friends arrived, Ian Stafford addressed himself to the groups of men at the pit’s mouth, asking for news.  Seeing Brengyn approach Jasmine, he hurried over, recognizing in the stalwart miner a leader of men.

“It’s a chance in a thousand,” he heard Brengyn say to Jasmine, whose white face showed no trace of tears, and who held herself with courage.  There was something akin in the expression of her face and that of other groups of women, silent, rigid and bitter, who stood apart, some with children’s hands clasped in theirs, facing the worst with regnant resolution.  All had that horrible quietness of despair so much more poignant than tears and wailing.  Their faces showed the weariness of labour and an ill-nourished daily life, but there was the same look in them as in Jasmine’s.  There was no class in this communion of suffering and danger.