The night was hot and overcast, the sky redrimmed with the lingering sunset of midsummer. They sat at the open window trying to fancy the air was fresher there. The   
trees and shrubs of the garden stood stiff and dark; beyond in the roadway a gas lamp burnt, bright orange against the hazy blue of the evening. Further were the three 
 
lights of the railway signal against the lowering sky. The man and woman spoke to one another in low tones.
“He does not suspect?” said the man, a little nervously.
“Not he,” she said peevishly, as though that too irritated her. “He thinks of nothing but the works and the prices of fuel. He has no imagination, no poetry—”
“None of these men of iron have,” he said sententiously. “They have no hearts.”
“He has not,” she said. She turned her discontented face towards the window. The distant sound of a roaring and rushing drew nearer and grew in volume; the house 
 
quivered; one heard the metallic rattle of the tender. As the train passed there was a glare of light above the cutting 308and a driving tumult of smoke; one, two, 
 
three, four, five, six, seven, eight black oblongs—eight trucks—passed across the dim grey of the embankment, and were suddenly extinguished one by one in the throat 
 
of the tunnel, which, with the last, seemed to swallow down train, smoke, and sound in one abrupt gulp.
“This country was all fresh and beautiful once,” he said; “and now—it is Gehenna. Down that way—nothing but pot-banks and chimneys belching fire and dust into the 
 
face of heaven— But what does it matter? An end comes, an end to all this cruelty—to-morrow.” He spoke the last word in a whisper.
“To-morrow,” she said, speaking in a whisper too, and still staring out of the window.
“Dear!” he said, putting his hand on hers.
She turned with a start, and their eyes searched one another’s. Hers softened to his gaze. “My dear one,” she said, and then: “It seems so strange—that you should 
 
have come into my life like this—to open—” She paused.
“To open?” he said.
“All this wonderful world—” she hesitated and spoke still more softly—“this world of love to me.”
Then suddenly the door clicked and closed. They turned their heads, and he started violently back. In the shadow of the room stood a great shadowy figure—silent. They 
 
saw the face dimly 309in the half-light, with unexpressive dark patches under the pent-house brows. Every muscle in Raut’s body suddenly became tense. When could the 
 
door have opened? What had he heard? Had he heard all? What had he seen? A tumult of questions.
The new-comer’s voice came at last, after a pause that seemed interminable. “Well?” he said.
“I was afraid I had missed you, Horrocks,” said the man at the window, gripping the window-ledge with his hand. His voice was unsteady.
The clumsy figure of Horrocks came forward out of the shadow. He made no answer to Raut’s remark. For a moment he stood above them.
The woman’s heart was cold within her. “I told Mr. Raut it was just possible you might come back,” she said, in a voice that never quivered.
Horrocks, still silent, sat down abruptly in the chair by her little work-table. His big hands were clenched; one saw now the fire of his eyes under the shadow of his 
 
brows. He was trying to get his breath. His eyes went from the woman he had trusted to the friend he had trusted, and then back to the woman.
By this time and for the moment all three half understood one another. Yet none dared say a word to ease the pent-up things that choked them.
310It was the husband’s voice that broke the silence at last.
“You wanted to see me?” he said to Raut.
Raut started as he spoke. “I came to see you,” he said, resolved to lie to the last.
“Yes?” said Horrocks.
“You promised,” said Raut, “to show me some fine effects of moonlight and smoke.”
“I promised to show you some fine effects of moonlight and smoke,” repeated Horrocks, in a colourless voice.
“And I thought I might catch you to-night before you went down to the works,” proceeded Raut, “and come with you.”
There was another pause. Did the man mean to take the thing coolly? Did he after all know? How long had he been in the room? Yet even at the moment when they heard the 
 
door, their attitudes—Horrocks glanced at the profile of the woman, shadowy pallid in the half-light. Then he glanced at Raut, and seemed to recover himself suddenly. 
 
“Of course,” he said, “I promised to show you the works under their proper dramatic conditions. It’s odd how I could have forgotten.”
“If I’m troubling you—” began Raut.
Horrocks started again. A new light had suddenly come into the sultry gloom of his eyes. “Not in the least,” he said.
“Have you been telling Mr. Raut of all these 311contrasts of flame and shadow you think so splendid?” said the woman, turning now to her husband for the first time, 
 
her confidence creeping back again, her voice just one half-note too high. “That dreadful theory of yours that machinery is beautiful and everything else in the world 
 
ugly. I thought he would not spare you, Mr. Raut. It’s his great Theory, his one discovery in Art—”
“I am slow to make discoveries,” said Horrocks, grimly, damping her suddenly. “But what I discover—” He stopped.
“Well?” she said.
“Nothing,” and suddenly he rose to his feet.
“I promised to show you the works,” he said to Raut, and put his big, clumsy hand on his friend’s shoulder. “And you are ready to go?”
“Quite,” said Raut, and stood up also.
There was another pause. Each of them peered through the indistinctness of the dusk at the other two. Horrocks’s hand still rested on Raut’s shoulder. Raut half 
 
fancied still that the incident was trivial after all. But Mrs. Horrocks knew her husband better, knew that grim quiet in his voice, and the confusion in her mind took 
 
a vague shape of physical evil. “Very well,” said Horrocks, and, dropping his hand, turned towards the door.
“My hat?” Raut looked round in the half-light.
312“That’s my work-basket,” said Mrs. Horrocks, with a gust of hysterical laughter. The hands came together on the back of the chair. “Here it is!” he said. She 
 
had an impulse to warn him in an undertone, but she could not frame a word. “Don’t go!” and “Beware of him!” struggled in her mind, and the swift moment passed.
“Got it?” said Horrocks, standing with door half open.
Raut stepped towards him. “Better say good-bye to Mrs. Horrocks,” said the ironmaster, even more grimly quiet in his tone than before.
Raut started and turned. “Good evening, Mrs. Horrocks,” he said, and their hands touched.
Horrocks held the door open with a ceremonial politeness unusual in him towards men. Raut went out and then, after a wordless look at her, her husband followed. She 
 
stood motionless while Raut’s light footfall and her husband’s heavy tread, like bass and treble, passed down the passage together. The front door slammed heavily. 
 
She went to the window, moving slowly, and stood watching—leaning forward. The two men appeared for a moment at the gateway in the road, passed under the street lamp, 
 
and were hidden by the black masses of the shrubbery. The lamplight fell for a moment on their faces, showing only unmeaning pale 313patches, telling nothing of what 
 
she still feared, and doubted, and craved vainly to know. Then she sank down into a crouching attitude in the big arm-chair, her eyes wide open and staring out at the 
 
red lights from the furnaces that flickered in the sky. An hour after she was still there, her attitude scarcely changed.
The oppressive stillness of the evening weighed heavily upon Raut. They went side by side down the road in silence, and in silence turned into the cinder-made by-way 
 
that presently opened out the prospect of the valley.
A blue haze, half dust, half mist, touched the long valley with mystery. Beyond were Hanley and Etruria, grey and dark masses, outlined thinly by the rare golden dots 
 
of the street lamps, and here and there a gas-lit window, or the yellow glare of some late-working factory or crowded public-house. Out of the masses, clear and 
 
slender against the evening sky, rose a multitude of tall chimneys, many of them reeking, a few smokeless during a season of “play.” Here and there a pallid patch 
 
and ghostly stunted beehive shapes showed the position of a pot-bank, or a wheel, black and sharp against the hot lower sky, marked some colliery where they raise the 
 
iridescent coal of the place. Nearer at hand was the broad stretch of railway, and half invisible trains shunted—a steady puffing and rumbling, with every run a 
 
ringing concussion 314and a rhythmic series of impacts, and a passage of intermittent puffs of white steam across the further view. And to the left, between the 
 
railway and the dark mass of the low hill beyond, dominating the whole view, colossal, inky black, and crowned with smoke and fitful flames, stood the great cylinders 
 
of the Jeddah Company Blast Furnaces, the central edifices of the big ironworks of which Horrocks was the manager. They stood heavy and threatening, full of an 
 
incessant turmoil of flames and seething molten iron, and about the feet of them rattled the rolling mills, and the steam hammer beat heavily and splashed the white 
 
iron sparks hither and thither. Even as they looked a truckful of fuel was shot into one of the giants, and the red flames gleamed out, and a confusion of smoke and 
 
black dust came boiling upwards towards the sky.
“Certainly you get some fine effects of colour with your furnaces,” said Raut, breaking a silence that had become apprehensive.
Horrocks grunted. He stood with his hands in his pockets, frowning down at the dim steaming railway and the busy ironworks beyond, frowning as if he were thinking out 
 
some knotty problem.
Raut glanced at him and away again. “At present your moonlight effect is hardly ripe,” he continued, looking upward; “the moon is still smothered by the vestiges of 
 
daylight.”
315Horrocks stared at him with the expression of a man who has suddenly awakened. “Vestiges of daylight! Of course, of course.” He too looked up at the moon, pale 
 
still in the midsummer sky. “Come along,” he said suddenly, and, gripping Raut’s arm in his hand, made a move towards the path that dropped from them towards the 
 
railway.
Raut hung back. Their eyes met and saw a thousand things in a moment that their lips came near to say. Horrocks’s hand tightened and then relaxed. He left go, and 
 
before Raut was aware, they were arm in arm, and walking, one unwillingly enough, down the path.
“You see the fine effect of the railway signals towards Burslem,” said Horrocks, suddenly breaking into loquacity, striding fast and tightening the grip of his elbow 
 
the while. “Little green lights and red and white lights, all against the haze. You have an eye for effect, Raut. It’s a fine effect. And look at those furnaces of 
 
mine, how they rise upon us as we come down the hill. That to the right is my pet—seventy feet of him. I packed him myself, and he’s boiled away cheerfully with iron 
 
in his guts for five long years. I’ve a particular fancy for him. That line of red there,—a lovely bit of warm orange you’d call it, Raut,—that’s the puddler’s 
 
furnaces, and there, in the hot light, three black figures—did you see the white splash of the steam hammer then?—that’s 316the rolling mills. Come along! Clang, 
 
clatter, how it goes rattling across the floor! Sheet tin, Raut,—amazing stuff. Glass mirrors are not in it when that stuff comes from the mill. And, squelch!—there 
 
goes the hammer again. Come along!”
He had to stop talking to catch at his breath. His arm twisted into Raut’s with benumbing tightness. He had come striding down the black path towards the railway as 
 
though he was possessed. Raut had not spoken a word, had simply hung back against Horrocks’s pull with all his strength.
“I say,” he said now, laughing nervously, but with an undernote of snarl in his voice, “why on earth are you nipping my arm off, H............