She stood there in the center of the horror, reeling a little once or twice, holding her skirt up over her left arm, and shouting her quick orders. "Hurt?" she said again to a questioning helper. "I don't know. I haven't time to find out. That man there is alive! Get a doctor!" She did not leave the Works until two badly burned men had been carried away, and two dead bodies lifted out of the reek of steam and the spatter of half-chilled metal. Then, still holding her skirt over her arm, she went alone, in the darkness, up the path to her back door. "No! I don't want anybody to go home with me," she said, angrily; "look after things here. Notify Mr. Ferguson. I'll come back." When she banged open her own door, she had only one question: "Is--Nannie--all--right?" Harris, gaping with dismay, and stammering, "My goodness! yes'm; yes'm!" followed her to the dining-room, where she crashed down like a felled tree, and lay unconscious on the floor. When she began to come to herself, a doctor, for whom Harris had fled, was binding up her torn arm, which, covered with blood, and black with grit and rust, was an ugly sight. "Where's Blair?" she said, thickly; then came entirely to her senses, and demanded, sharply, "Nannie all right?" Reassured again on this point, she looked frowningly at the doctor. "Come, hurry! I want to get back to the Works." "Back to the Works! To-night? Impossible! You mustn't think of such a thing," the young man protested. Mrs. Maitland looked at him, and he shifted from one foot to the other. "It--it won't do, really," he said, weakly; "that was a pretty bad knock you got on the back of your head, and your arm--" "Young man," she said, "you patch this up, _quick_. I've got to see to my men. That's my business. You 'tend to yours." "But my business is to keep you here," he told her, essaying to be humorous. His humor went out like a little candle in the wind: "Your business is to put on bandages. That's all I pay you for." And the doctor put on bandages with expedition. In the front hall he spoke to Nannie. "Your mother has a very bad arm, Miss Maitland; and that violent blow on her head may have done damage. I can't tell yet. You must make her keep still." "_Make!_--Mamma?" said Nannie. "She says she's going over to the Works," said the doctor, shrugging his shoulders; "when she comes home, get her to bed as quickly as you can. I'll come in and see her in the morning, if she wants me. But if she won't do what I say about keeping quiet, I'd rather you called in other advice." When Nannie tried to "make Mamma" keep still, the only reply she received was: "You showed your sense in going home, my dear!" And off she went, Harris, at Nannie's instigation, lurking along behind her. "If Herbert's girl had been hurt!" she said, aloud, staggering a little as she walked, "my God, what would I have done?"