They went down Winter Street, stepping over the hose-coils, and across the leaking streams; they came to the crossing of Washington, where yesterday throngs of women passed, shopping from stately store to store.

Beyond, were smoke and ruin; swaying walls, heaps of fallen masonry, chevaux-de-frises of bristling gas and water-pipes, broken and protruding.  A little way down, to the left, sheets of flame, golden in the gray daylight, were pouring from the face of the beautiful “Transcript” building.

They stood, fearful and watchful, under the broken granite walls opposite Trinity Church.

Windows and doors were gone from the grand old edifice; inside, the fire was shining; devouring at its dreadful ease, the sacred architecture and furnishings that it had swept down to the ground.

“See!  There he is!” whispered Miss Smalley to Mr. Sparrow, as she gazed with unconscious tears falling fast down her pale old cheeks.

It was the Rector of Trinity, who thought to have stood this morning in the holy place to speak to his people.  Down the middle of the street he came, and went up to the cumbered threshold and the open arch, within which a terrible angel was speaking in his stead.

“Do you think he remembers now, what he said about the God of Daniel, as he looks into the blazing fiery furnace?”

“I dare say he doesn’t ever remember what he said; but he remembers always what is,” answered the watch-maker.

CHAPTER XXIII.

EVENING AND MORNING:  THE SECOND DAY.

The strange, sad Sunday wore along.

The teams rolled on, incessantly, through the streets; the blaze and smoke went up from the sixty acres of destruction; friends gathered together and talked of the one thing, that talk as they might, would not be put into any words.  Men whose wealth had turned to ashes in a night went to and fro in the same coats they had worn yesterday, and hardly knew yet whether they themselves were the same or not.  It seemed, so strangely, as if the clock might be set back somehow, and yesterday be again; it was so little way off!

Women who had received, perhaps, their last wages for the winter on Saturday night, sat in their rooms and wondered what would be on Monday.

Aunt Blin was excited; strong with excitement.  She went down-stairs to see Miss Smalley, who was too tired to sit up.

Out of the fire, Bel Bree and Paulina Smalley had each brought something that remained by them secretly all this day.

When they had stopped there under those smoked and shattered walls, and Morris Hewland had drawn Bel’s hand within his arm to keep her from any movement into danger, he had gently laid his own fingers, in care and caution, upon hers.  A feeling had come to them both with the act, and for a moment, as if the world, with all its great built-up barriers of stone, had broken down around them, and lay at their feet in fragments, among which they two stood free together.