Just as they approached the ruins a body was found and brought to the enclosure for identification. The mother recognized her daughter by an earring. She flung herself across the black-charred trunk with a shriek that rang clear and soul-piercing above the roar and thunder of the city's life at high tide. Above the rumble of car, the rattle of wagon, the jar of machinery, the tramp and murmur of millions the awful cry pierced the sky. Kate put her hand on Gordon's arm and pressed her red lips together, shivering. "O dear! O dear! what a cry! I can't go any closer. I'll wait for you out at the edge of the crowd." He pushed into the throng, lifted the woman, spoke a few words of tenderness to her, and told her he would call at her home later. As he was about to leave, a tall, delicate man working among the ruins reeled and sank in a faint. When he revived, he quit his job and went home without a word. "What was the matter with that man?" Gordon asked the foreman of the wrecking company. "Starved, to tell you the truth. He came here yesterday and begged for a job. He looked so pale and sick I couldn't refuse him. He fainted the first hour and went home. He came back this morning and begged me to try him again. I did, but you see he is too weak. He told me his family was starving." He joined Kate and they crossed the City Hall Square and walked down Centre Street to the Tombs prison. She was pale and quiet, glancing at him now and then. "I've an engagement at the Tombs," he told her, "with a lady to whom I used to make innocent love in our youth in a college town. I got a note from her yesterday, written in the clear, beautiful hand I recognised from the memory of little perfumed things she used to send me. You don't know what a queer sick feeling came over me when I recognised from the street number that she was in prison. I haven't seen her in fifteen years. She was the village belle and made what was supposed to be a brilliant marriage." They entered the grim old prison, that looked like an Egyptian temple, with its huge slanting walls of granite squatting low on Centre Street like a big pot-bellied spider, watching with one eye the brilliant insects of wealth on Broadway and with the other the gray vermin swarming under the Bridge and along the river. Kate put her hand on Gordon's arm and drew closer as they passed down its gloomy corridor to the warden's office. She tried to smile, but by the twitching at the corners of her full lips he could see she was nearer to crying. Again, as her body touched his, he felt the warmth and glow of her beauty, her blue eyes, cordial and grave, her waving auburn hair with its glowing fires, her step luxurious and rhythmic, and. now as her hand trembled, instead of the gleam of cruelty and conscious power, the timid appeal to the strength of the man. She looked at him and lowered her eyes, and then flashed them up straight into his face with a smile. "I'm not afraid!" she said impulsively.