eagerly. At every sentence, Wolfe listened more and more like
a dumb, hopeless animal, with a duller, more stolid look
creeping over his face, glancing now and then at Mitchell,
marking acutely every smallest sign of refinement, then back to
himself, seeing as in a mirror his filthy body, his more stained
soul.

Never! He had no words for such a thought, but he knew now, in
all the sharpness of the bitter certainty, that between them
there was a great gulf never to be passed. Never!

The bell of the mills rang for midnight. Sunday morning had
dawned. Whatever hidden message lay in the tolling bells
floated past these men unknown. Yet it was there. Veiled in
the solemn music ushering the risen Saviour was a key-note to
solve the darkest secrets of a world gone wrong,--even this
social riddle which the brain of the grimy puddler grappled with
madly to-night.

The men began to withdraw the metal from the caldrons. The
mills were deserted on Sundays, except by the hands who fed the
fires, and those who had no lodgings and slept usually on the
ash-heaps. The three strangers sat still during the next hour,
watching the men cover the furnaces, laughing now and then at
some jest of Kirby's.

"Do you know," said Mitchell, "I like this view of the works
better than when the glare was fiercest? These heavy shadows
and the amphitheatre of smothered fires are ghostly, unreal.
One could fancy these red smouldering lights to be the half-shut