Well, it was a pretty sight! She wished she had told him that she herself thought it pretty; but the fact was, it had never struck her before. "I suppose I don't notice pretty things very much," she thought, in some surprise. "Well, I've never had time for foolishness. Too busy making money for Blair." She sighed; after all, he wasn't going to have the money. She had been heaping up riches, and had not known who should gather them. She had been too busy to see pretty things. And why? That orphan asylums and reformatories--and David Richie's hospital--should have a few extra thousands! A month ago the fund she was making for David had reached the limit she had set for it, and only to-day she had brought the bank certificate of deposit home with her. She had felt a little glow of satisfaction when she locked it into the safe in her desk; she liked the consciousness of a good job finished. She was going to summon the youngster to Mercer, and tell him how he was to administer the fund; and if he put on any of his airs and graces about accepting money, she would shut him up mighty quick! "I'll write him to-morrow, if I've time," she had said. At the moment, the sense of achievement had exhilarated her; yet now, as she sat there on the heap of scrap, bending a pliant boring between her fingers, her pillar of fire roaring overhead from the chimneys of the furnaces, the achievement seemed flat enough. Why should she, to build a hospital for another woman's son, have worked so hard that she had never had time to notice the things her own son called "pretty"? Not his china beetles, of course, or truck like that; but the shimmering flow of her iron,--or even that picture, for which she was out of pocket $5,000. "I can see you might call it pretty, if it hadn't cost so much," she admitted. Yes, she had worked, she told herself, "as hard as a man," to earn money for Blair!--only to make him idle and to have him say that thing about her clothes which Goose Molly had said before he was born. "Wonder if I've been a fool?" she ruminated. It was at that moment that she noticed, at one side of the furnace, between two bricks of the hearth, a little puff of white vapor; instantly she leaped, shouting, to her feet. But it was too late. The molten iron, seeping down through some crack in the furnace, creeping, creeping, beneath the bricks of the pavement, had reached some moisture...The explosion, the clouds of scalding steam, the terror of the flowing, scattering fire, drowned her voice and hid her frantic gestures of warning.... "Killed?" she said, furiously, as some one helped her up from the scrap-heap against which she had been hurled; "of course not! I don't get killed." Then suddenly the appalling confusion was dominated by her voice: "_Look after those men._"