It was a warm May twilight; above the gaunt outline of the foundry, the dim sickle of a young moon hung in a daffodil sky; the river, running black between banks of slag and cinders, caught the sheen of gold and was transfigured into glass mingled with fire. Through the open windows, the odor of white lilacs and the acrid sweetness of the blossoming plum-tree, floated into the room. The gas was not lighted; sometimes the pulsating flames, roaring out sidewise from under the half-shut dampers of the great chimneys, lighted the dusk with a red glare, and showed Blair's face set in new lines. He had never been so near the great Reality before; never been in a house where, on the threshold, Death was standing; his personal affairs, angers or anxieties, dropped out of his mind. So sitting and listening and not speaking, the doctor found them. "She has gone," he said, solemnly. Nannie began to cry; Blair stood up, then walked to the window and looked out at the Yards. _Dead?_ For a moment the word had no meaning. Then, abruptly, the old, elemental meaning struck him like a blow; that meaning which the animal in us knows, before we know the acquired meanings which grief and faith have put into the word: his mother "was not." It was incredible! He gasped as he stood at the window, looking out over the blossoming lilacs at the Works, black against a fading saffron sky. Ten minutes ago his mother was in the other room, owning those Works; now--? The sheer impossibility of imagining the cessation of such a personality filled him with an extraordinary dismay. He was conscious of a bewildered inability to believe what had been said to him. Mr. Ferguson, who had been with Sarah Maitland when the end came, followed the doctor into the parlor; but neither he nor Blair remembered personalities. They stood together now, listening to what the doctor was saying; Blair, still dazed and unbelieving, put his arm round Nannie and said, "Don't cry, dear; Mr. Ferguson, tell her not to cry!" And the older man said, "Make her sit down, Blair; she looks a little white." Both of them had forgotten individual resentments or embarrassments. When some people die, it is as if a candle flame were gently blown out; but when, on the other side of the hall, this big woman lay dead on the floor, it seemed to the people who stood by as if the whole machinery of life had stopped. It was so absorbing in its astonishment that everything else became simple. Even when Elizabeth entered, and came to put her arms around Nannie, Blair hardly noticed her. As the doctor and Robert Ferguson spoke together in low tones, of terrible things they called "arrangements," Sarah Maitland's son listened, and tried to make himself understand that they were talking of--his mother! "I shall stay until everything has been done," Mr. Ferguson said, after the doctor left them. "Blair, you and Elizabeth will be here, of course, to-night? Or else I'll stay. Nannie mustn't be alone."