“Hallo, Bram!” cried he, catching sight of the young fellow, and laughing at him over the iron balustrade. “You look as solemn as a whole bench of judges. What’s the matter?”
Bram hesitated. He did not know whether to tell Christian that Claire was about, or whether to hold his tongue. Doubt was cut short in a couple of seconds, however, when Christian reached the bottom of the staircase. For he came face to face with Claire, who had appeared as quickly and as silently as she had previously disappeared from one of the doors which opened on the ground floor.
Both stared at each other without a word for the space of half a minute. Both were pale as the dead; but while he shook from head to foot she was outwardly quite calm.
“I want—to speak to you,” she said at last.
Her voice sounded hard, unlike her usual tones. There was something in them which sounded in Bram’s ears like a menace.
Christian looked around, as if afraid of being seen.
“Not here,” said he quickly. “In the works. I will go first.”
He disappeared at once, and Claire followed him out through the door and across the first of the yards, where the work was slackening off, and where swarms of dusky, grimy figures, their eyes gleaming white in their smoke and dust-begrimed faces, were hustling each other in their eagerness to be out. Like a flash of lightning there passed through Bram’s mind, brought there by the sudden contact with this black, toiling world from which Christian had rescued him, by the strong well-remembered smell of mingled sweat, coal-dust, and fustian, an overwhelming sense of love and gratitude for Chris, mingled with fear.
Yet what was he afraid of? What made him struggle through the crowd with a white face and laboring breath, in mad anxiety to keep close to the footsteps of the man and the woman? He could not tell. For surely he had no fear of poor, little, helpless Claire, however wild her look might be, however desperate the straits in which she found herself!
He had lost sight of both of them within a few steps of the office doors. They had been swallowed up in the stream of workmen who were pressing out as they went in.