Through all this the girl’s flying fingers never halted or slowed, her eyes never strayed from their set lines. She appeared to be doing two things at once all the time, to be watching and catching unfailingly the flashing wink of the opening black eye in the blurring circle, the swing of the quivering needle-point, and at the same time to see where to find the next fuse, the starting lever, the place to put the fuse “passed.” Once she slipped out a fuse, prodded and fiddled at it a moment with some mysteriously appearing tools, jabbed it back in the machine, whirled it, stopped it, slid it to the “passed” side, and without pause went on to the next. “That,” said the manager, “was a ‘fault’ she spotted--shutter opened too soon or too late. Slight fault evidently she could rectify herself. If she couldn’t she’d have sent it back as a reject.” The manager spoke to her, and she answered him without lifting her head or her eye or checking her hand an instant. And in turn I spoke to her and told her just what the work she was doing meant to the Front. At my first word she just flicked that quick glance at me again and kept on smoothly and swiftly at her work. So, without interrupting her, I went on and told her what a “premature” through a faulty fuse might mean, at our end--a high explosive bursting in the bore, blowing out the breech-block, splitting the piece, killing and wounding perhaps every other man, or every man at the gun; or a shrapnel prematuring at the muzzle, and the bullets that should have gone lifting high and clear inside the case smashing, perhaps, into the open rear of a gun-emplacement or a battery a few hundred yards in front of the prematuring gun; or a shell exploding a second or two before it should, some bare scores of yards short of where it should have burst, spilling its hundreds of bullets down into our own trenches instead of the enemy’s, hindering and hurting our own men instead of helping them. If she had missed that fault she had just caught, I told her, the shell that fuse was fitted to might, probably would, have done some such deadly work; and every fuse she tested and passed good was one other certain to do its proper work and help our men to storm a trench or hold off an assault. Then I came away, and I suppose she is sitting there now, her slender fingers flying deftly to and fro, her pretty head and soft hair bent over that whirling machine, her young girl’s eyes wide and intent on the blurring fuse and the jumping needle, at either elbow a heaped pile of golden-gleaming metal that soon or late will go roaring out from the guns in flaming cordite blasts to beat a way through for the Front to take to Victory and Peace.