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. "_I am the Resurrection and the Life._" A great pulsation passed through the mob of workmen. On all sides strong men broke down and wept. The child stared at the platform, then at these faces round her that were turned upon her. "Daddy--where's Daddy?" she said trembling, her piteous eyes travelling up and down the pretty lady beside her. Laura sat down on the edge of a truck and drew the little shaking creature to her breast. Such a power of tenderness went out from her, so soft was the breast, so lulling the scent of the roses pinned into the lady's belt, that the child was stilled. Every now and then, as she looked at the men, pressing round her, a passion of fear seemed to run through her; she shuddered and struggled in Laura's hold. Otherwise she made not a sound. And the great words swept on. * * * * * How the scene penetrated!--leaving great stabbing lines never to be effaced in the quivering tissues of the girl's nature. Once before she had heard the English Burial Service. Her father--groaning and fretting under the penalties of friendship--had taken her, when she was fifteen, to the funeral of an old Cambridge colleague. She remembered still the cold cemetery chapel, the gowned mourners, the academic decorum, or the mild regret amid which the function passed. Then her father's sharp impatience as they walked home--that reasonable men in a reasonable age should be asked to sit and listen to Paul's logic, and the absurdities of Paul's cosmical speculations!