He disappeared at once, and Claire followed him out through the door and across the first of the yards, where the work was slackening off, and where swarms of dusky, grimy figures, their eyes gleaming white in their smoke and dust-begrimed faces, were hustling each other in their eagerness to be out. Like a flash of lightning there passed through Bram’s mind, brought there by the sudden contact with this black, toiling world from which Christian had rescued him, by the strong well-remembered smell of mingled sweat, coal-dust, and fustian, an overwhelming sense of love and gratitude for Chris, mingled with fear. Yet what was he afraid of? What made him struggle through the crowd with a white face and laboring breath, in mad anxiety to keep close to the footsteps of the man and the woman? He could not tell. For surely he had no fear of poor, little, helpless Claire, however wild her look might be, however desperate the straits in which she found herself! He had lost sight of both of them within a few steps of the office doors. They had been swallowed up in the stream of workmen who were pressing out as they went in. Bram could only go at a venture in one direction through yards and past workshops, without much idea whether he was on the right track or not. He had a fancy that he might perhaps come up with them near the spot where he had first seen them together on that hot August afternoon eighteen months before, when Christian had picked him out for notice to his father, and so laid the foundation of his fortunes. But when Bram got there, and stood where, rod in hand, he had stood that day, just outside one of the great rolling sheds, wiping the sweat from his forehead, he found the place deserted. The noise of the day had ceased; the steam hammers stood in their places like a row of closed jaws after an infernal meal. A huge iron plate, glowing red under its dusky gray surface in the darkness lay on the ground near Bram’s feet--fiery relic of the labors of the day. Bram passed on, peering into the sheds, where the machinery was still, and where the great leather bands hung resting on the grinding wheels. Past the huge presses he went, where the glowing plates of steel are curled into shape like wax under the slow descending, crushing weight of iron. Through the great room where the great armor-plates are shaved down, the steel shavings curling up like yards upon yards of silver ribbon under the slow, steady advance of the huge machine. At last Bram fancied that he caught the sound of voices: the one shrill and vehement, the other deeper, lower, the voice of a man. He hurried on. Through the heart of the works, which stretched for hundreds of acres on either side of it, ran the railway, at this point a wide network of lines, crossing and recrossing each other, carrying the goods traffic of the busy city. Bram came out upon it as he heard the voices, and looked anxiously, about him.