MORNING SERIAL

THERE was no more work done that afternoon. A grim silence fell across the foundry. The men spoke in whispers. The heavy cranes were deserted, and there was no relief from the tension until the hooter blew. Ieuan waited until the coreshop emptied. Heartbroken, he made his way down the silent yard.

Frank was dead. Dead. His friend was dead. Vainly he tried to accept the truth of the tragedy. But the accident and its consequences were too horrible to visualize.

It had been a dream, a nightmare. It was impossible to conceive that Frank was dead. Gone. Blotted out from existence as suddenly as the fusing of a light.

Yet it was true. He would never see him again. Never. His voice was silenced, even as the limbs that once pulsated with life and vigour were stiffened and cold.

The cheery grin he would see no more. The friendly words would never again be spoken.

Death had come. Final and irrevocable. The foundry had killed him. Taken him in the prime of his young manhood. The Frank he had known was no more.

The streets were deserted as he walked wearily homewards, and the only sound he heard was the dragging of his heavy boots along the pavement.

Frank’s terrifying screams shrilled in his ears. Try as he would to rid himself of them, their echoes still persisted. He lived over and over again the catastrophic moment of that afternoon, and the present seemed an eternity of agony.

Blindly he walked on, his mind obsessed by the tragedy. At the corner of the street where he lived a figure waited, vague in the dim light that shone down from the lamppost. He drew near. The figure turned. “Ieuan!” “Sally – it’s you !” He looked at her, distraught. “You’re ill, Sally. Why – why are you out?”

“Oh, Ieuan, I heard the awful news, and I–I just had to come and see you.”

“But you shouldn’t be out. Please, please go back.”

“I’m better now, Ieuan – truly I am. Much better, and I felt I must see you.” He grasped her hand tightly.

“That was lovely of you, Sally, but you shouldn’t …” Suddenly a wild paroxysm of grief seized him. He began to sob unrestrainedly.