Adrian Fellowes had gone back to Glencader to do necessary things, to prepare the household for any emergency; and she was grateful for the respite.  If she had been thrown with him in the desperate mood of the moment, she would have lost her self-control.  Happily, fate had taken him away for a few hours; and who could tell what might not happen in a few hours?  Meanwhile, there was humanity’s work to be done.

About four o’clock in the morning, when she came out from a cottage where she had assisted Mr. Mappin in a painful and dangerous operation, she stood for a moment in reverie, looking up at the hills, whose peace had been shrilly broken a few hours before by that distracted waif of the world, fleeing from the pain of life.

An ample star of rare brilliancy came stealing up over the trees against the sky-line, twinkling and brimming with light.

“No,” she said, as though in reply to an inner voice, “there’s nothing for me—­nothing.  I have missed it all.”  Her hands clasped her breast in pain, and she threw her face upwards.  But the light of the star caught her eyes, and her hands ceased to tremble.  A strange quietness stole over her.

“My child, my lost beloved child,” she whispered.

Her eyes swam with tears now, the lines of pain at her mouth relaxed, the dark look in her eyes stole away.  She watched the star with sorrowful eyes.  “How much misery does it see!” she said.  Suddenly, she thought of Rudyard Byng.  “He saved my life,” she murmured.  “I owe him—­ah, Adrian might have paid the debt!” she cried, in pain.  “If he had only been a man to-night—­”

At that moment there came a loud noise up the valley from the pit’s mouth—­a great shouting.  An instant later two figures ran past her.  One was Jasmine, the other was a heavy-footed miner.  Gathering her cloak around her Al’mah sped after them.

A huddled group at the pit’s mouth, and men and women running toward it; a sharp voice of command, and the crowd falling back, making way for men who carried limp bodies past; then suddenly, out of wild murmurs and calls, a cry of victory like the call of a muezzin from the tower of a mosque—­a resonant monotony, in which a dominant principle cries.

A Welsh preaching hillman, carried away by the triumph of the moment, gave the great tragedy the bugle-note of human joy and pride.

Ian Stafford and Brengyn and Jim Gawley had conquered.  The limp bodies carried past Al’mah were not dead.  They were living, breathing men whom fresh air and a surgeon’s aid would soon restore.  Two of them were the young men with the bonny wives who now with murmured endearments grasped their cold hands.  Behind these two was carried Rudyard Byng, who could command the less certain concentration of a heart.  The men whom Rudyard had gone to save could control a greater wealth, a more precious thing than anything he had.  The boundaries of the interests of these workers were limited, but their souls were commingled with other souls bound to them by the formalities; and every minute of their days, every atom of their forces, were moving round one light, the light upon the hearthstone.  These men were carried ahead of Byng now, as though by the ritual of nature taking their rightful place in life’s procession before him.