Mrs. Maitland looked at her in astonishment. "Scares you? What scares you?" "It's so--dreadful," Nannie gasped. "You don't suppose I'd bring you anywhere where you could get hurt?" her stepmother said, incredulously. She was astonished to the point of being pained. How could Herbert's girl be such a fool? She remembered that Blair used to call his sister the "'fraid-cat." "Good name," she thought, contemptuously. She made no allowance for the effect of this scene of night and fire, of stupendous shadows and crashing noises, upon a little bleached personality, which for all these years, had lived in the shadow of a nature so dominant and aggressive that, quite unconsciously, it sucked the color and the character out of any temperament feebler than itself. Sarah Maitland frowned, and said roughly, "Oh, you can go home, if you want to; Mr. Parks!" she called to the foreman; "just walk back to the house, if you please, with my daughter;" then she turned on her heel and went up to the furnace. Nannie, clutching Parks's hand, stumbled out into the darkness. "It's perfectly awful!" she confided to the good-natured man, when he left her at her back door. "Oh, you get used to it," he said, kindly. "You'd 'a knowed," he told one of his workmen afterward, "that there wasn't hide nor hair of her that belonged to the Old One. A slip of a thing, and scared to death of the noise." The "Old One," after Nannie had gone, poked about for a moment or two,--"she noses into things, to save two cents," her men used to say, with reluctant admiration of the ruthless shrewdness that was instant to detect their shortcomings; then she went down the slight incline from the furnace hearth to the open stretch of molding-sand; there was a pile of rusty scrap at one side, and here, in the soft April darkness under the stars, she seated herself, looking absently at the furnace and the black, gnome-like figures of the helpers. She was thinking just what Parks had thought, that Nannie had none of her blood in her. "Afraid!" said Sarah Maitland. Well, Blair had never been afraid, she would say that for him; he was a fool, and pig-headed, and a loafer; but he wasn't a coward. He had even thought it fine, that scene of power, where civilization made itself before his very eyes! When would he think it fine enough to come in and go to work? Come in, and take his part in making civilization? Then she noticed the bending figure of the keeper opening the notch of the furnace; instantly there was a roar of sparks, and a blinding white gush of molten iron flowing like water down into the sand runner. The sudden, fierce illumination drowned the stars overhead, and brought into clear relief her own figure, sitting there on the pile of scrap watching the flowing iron. Tiny blue flames of escaping gas danced and shimmered on its ineffable rippling brightness, that cooled from dazzling snow to rose, then to crimson, and out in the sand, to glowing gray. Blair had called it "beautiful."