Laura looked.

"It's t' little gell, Ned! t' little gell!" said the elder workman to the
youth he was supporting.

And there in the midst of the blackened crowd of men was a child,
frightened and weeping, led tenderly forward by a grey-haired workman,
who looked down upon her, quite unconscious of the tears that furrowed
his own cheeks.

"Oh, let me--let me go!" cried Laura. The men about her fell back. They
made a way for her to the child. The old woman had disappeared. In an
instant Laura, as of right, took the place of her sex. Half an hour
before she had been the merest passing stranger in that vast company; now
she was part of them, organically necessary to the act passing in their
midst. The men yielded her the child instinctively, at once; she caught
the little one in her sheltering arm.

"Ought she to be here?" she asked sharply of the grey-haired man.

"They're goin to read the Burial Service, Miss," he said, as he dashed
away the mist from his eyes. "An we thowt that the little un would like
soom day to think she'd been here. So I found her--she wor in school."

The child looked round her in terror. The platform in front of the
furnace had been hurriedly cleared. It was now crowded with men--masters
and managers in black coats mingled with workmen, to the front the parson
in his white. He turned to the throng below and opened his book.