he 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 lamp-light fell
for a moment on their faces, showing only unmeaning pale patches,
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 gaslit 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 and 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 bea