They were walking rapidly from the foundry to the furnaces; Sarah Maitland was inspecting piles of pig, talking to puddlers, all the while bending and twisting between her strong fingers, with their blackened nails, a curl of borings, perhaps biting on it, thoughtfully, while she considered some piece of work, then blowing the crumbs of iron out from between her lips and bursting into quick directions or fault-finding. She stood among her men, in her short skirt, her gray hair straggling out over her forehead from under her shabby bonnet, and gave her orders; but for the first time in her life she was self-conscious--Blair was looking on! listening! thinking, no doubt, that one of these days he would be doing just what she was doing! For the moment she was as vain as a girl; then, abruptly, her happy excitement paused. She stood still, flinching and wincing, and putting a hand up to her eye. "Ach!" she said; "a filing!" she looked with the other sympathetically watering eye at her son. "Here, take this thing out." "_I_?" Blair said, dismayed. "Oh, I might hurt you." Then, in his helplessness and concern--for, ignorant as he was, he knew enough of the Works to know that an iron filing in your eye is no joke--he turned, with a flurried gesture, to one of the molders. "Get a doctor, can't you? Don't stand there staring!" "Doctor?" said Mrs. Maitland. She gave her son a look, and laughed. "He's afraid he'll hurt me!" she said, with a warm joyousness in her voice; "Jim, got a jack-knife? Just dig this thing out." Jim came, dirty and hesitating, but prepared for a very common emergency of the Works. With a black thumb and forefinger he raised the wincing lid, and with the pointed blade of the jack-knife lifted, with delicacy and precision, the irritating iron speck from the eyeball. "'Bliged," Mrs. Maitland said. She clapped a rather grimy handkerchief over the poor red eye, and turned to Blair. "Come on!" she said, and struck him on the shoulder so heartily that he stumbled. Her cheek was blackened by the molder's greasy fingers, and so smeared with tears from the still watering eye that he could not bear to look at it. He hesitated, then offered her his handkerchief, which at least had the advantage of being clean. She took it, glanced at its elaborate monogram, and laughed; then she dabbed her eye with it. "I guess I'll have to put some of that cologne of yours on this fancy thing. Remember that green bottle with the calendar and the red ribbons on it, that you gave me when you were a little fellow? I've never had anything of my own fine enough to use the stuff on!"