Clink of metals striking together, hammer sound, sound of the wheel, sound of the fed furnace, sound of voices among metals. Diccon Dawn, worker in rich metals with Jankin to help and a boy to help Jankin. All day were voices in the long room, footsteps to and fro, sound of the craft. Richard Englefield beginning again to make beautiful things.

As he worked he saw a lace-maker. Rich and beautiful lace.

He saw Wander forest, he saw the ruined farm, he saw Middle Forest, the prison there and the house by the river.

He worked from dawn to dusk. Work,—let some ease come that way! He was artist at work and some lightening came. One must love all.

The nights at first brought him long and faintly terrible dreams. He could not remember them in sequence, but some had horror and some had beauty, and now and again his brain caught from them small, vivid pictures.

Then, one night, he saw, half he thought in dream and half not in dream, a furnace and seated within it a man with a hammer and an anvil, and on the anvil a man, and they were both the one man, only the man with the hammer was the greater in aspect.

Work, work, and at last, after terrible dreams, pray! But no set prayers, only a wild cry upward to the man with the hammer.

The street lay baked clay under the sun, the street darkened beneath cloud. Rain poured down, cleansing and sweetening, making brooks of gutters, pattering and driving, singing the clean and the fresh, turning when out came the sun into uncounted glistening or rainbow orbs. Wind swept the street, a great bellows quickening life. Fog stole in, and the familiar became a foreigner, strange, remote, chill; surely the world was dying! Then came the sun, and the world was not dying.

He went to Old Anchor. The street of half ruinous houses was filled with a crowd of voices of sea-going and from-sea-returning folk. A woman with a child told him where to find her. She sat with bobbins in her hand, at a lace pillow. “Thou’rt pale! Weave, weave like this all day long!”

“So I buy bread. I do well.”

“So wretched a place! Morgen, come to my house. Richard and Alice Dawn—brother and sister.”

“No—no!”

They talked, they parted. Old Anchor and Thames side and street of the smiths. That night, lying awake, suddenly he saw her life; he passed into a calm and wide and lifted moment and saw it spread from childhood. Seeing so, it appeared his own experience,—not appeared, but was. Something like a great shutter closed upon that moment, then there opened another as wide and as deep. Space, there was space! “I have standing and moving room again!”

After a week he went once more to Old Anchor. “Morgen, I better understand your life and my life. This place harms you. Come into the smiths’ street and to the house where I am and where there is all room. We have need to be together and to learn together.”

“No—no!”

Again he went away. The next day, suddenly, while he was turning in his hands a bar of silver, his thoughts for a moment ran gold. He was back with a certain day in his stone workroom at Silver Cross and he was making a cup for Abbot Mark to give to a bishop. The great picture was in his thoughts, the Blessed among women. There were rolling fields and the villages of Palestine. Palestine? Everywhere she was, she was everywhere! That day had been two years ago. Now again to-day he saw that everywhere she was, that she was everywhere. Everywhere! In all realms, upper and lower, afar and near, great and small. Everywhere. Who had hurt her? No one and nothing. Naught!

Who had hurt him? No one.

That night he saw a great thorny field and two wanderers. Each had a great burden on his shoulders and each a staff. There seemed a path of pilgrimage. And now one came full upon it and pursued it and now the other. But they were not together, and there seemed a desolateness. Each fell away into the thorns and came again with toil. The mist closed all away. Again Richard Englefield prayed. “If it be in God that we are together—”

Night passed, day passed. Night again in the street of the smiths. A light through the window, a cry in the street, a bell that leaped into clanging. Fire! Fire!

Diccon Dawn hurrying on clothing, went with the rest. It seemed to be on the water side and to the eastward,—a great fire. When they came to the Thames they saw that it was a stretch of old buildings, a maze where the poor lived, together with seafaring folk. So joined were the houses that it might be one, or they might be ten. Old Anchor—Old Anchor!

The sky was murk and flame, any face might be read; the fire-ocean leaped in breakers, roared, licked up and sucked under. All the air was sound, all the bells were ringing, all the heart was bursting. Middle Forest! A heap of fagots by town cross.

Old Anchor, and many heroic things done that night by men and women and children. But a man, a goldsmith, entered farthest, endured longest, brought forth in his arms whom he had gone to seek, out of the heart of it. “Is she dead? No! Dead with the smoke, and fire has touched her arms and her breast and her sides. Who is she? The man’s sister. Where will he take her? He will carry her through the street to his house. Diccon Dawn, a goldsmith. He will nurse her there—oh, tenderly, tenderly.”

It was so.

He nursed here there, oh, tenderly, and she came back to life and to strength through much suffering.

“It hurts? I would that I could take that!”

“Oh, aye, it hurts sore! But I will keep it and bear it and see it change.”

“So much more I know about thee than I used to know! Thou hast courage.”

“So much more I know of thee. Thou hast strength, patience. If I moan with the pain, it helps me to utter it.”

“See thou, it is meant for us to be together.”