Before the end of that first week, in which the stun and shock were reacting in prompt, cheerful, benevolent organizing and providing,—­in which, through wonderful, dreamlike ruins, like the ruins of the far-off past, people were wandering, amazed, seeing a sudden torch laid right upon the heart and centre of a living metropolis and turning it to a shadow and a decay,—­in which human interests and experiences came to mingle that had never consciously approached each other before,—­in which the little household of independent existences in Leicester Place was fused into an almost family relation all at once, after years of mere juxtaposition,—­before the end of that week, Aunt Blin died.

It was as though the fiery thrust that had transpierced the heart of “her Boston,” had smitten the centre of her own vitality in the self-same hour.

All her clothes hung in the closet; the very bend of her arm was in the sleeve of the well worn alpaca dress, the work-basket, with a cloth jacket-front upon it, in which was a half-made button-hole, left just at the stitch where all her labor ended, was on the round table; Cheeps was singing in the window; Bartholomew was winking on the hearth-rug; and little Bel, among these belongings that she knew not what to do with any more, was all alone.

CHAPTER XXIV.

TEMPTATION.

The Relief Committee was organizing in Park Street Vestry.

Women with help in their hands and sympathy in their hearts, came there to meet women who wanted both; came, many of them, straight from the first knowledge of the loss of almost all their own money, with word and act of fellowship ready for those upon whose very life the blow fell yet closer and harder.  Over the separating lines of class and occupation a divine impulse reached, at least for the moment, both ways.

“Boffin’s Bower” was all alert with aggressive, independent movement.  Here, they did not believe in the divine impulse of the hour.  They would stay on their own side of the line.  They would help themselves and each other.  They would stand by their own class, and cry “hands off!” to the rich women.

What was to be done, for lasting understanding and true relation, between these conflicting, yet mutually dependent elements?

In their own separate places sat solitary girls and women who sought neither yet.

Bel Bree was one.

The little room which had been home while Aunt Blin lived there with her, was suddenly become only a dreary, lonely lodging-room.  Cheeps and Bartholomew were there, chirping and purring, the sun was shining in; the things were all hers, for Aunt Blin had written one broad, straggling, unsteady line upon a sheet of paper the last day she lived, when the fever and confusion had ebbed away out of her brain as life ebbed slowly back, beaten from its outworks by disease, toward her heart, and she lay feebly, but clearly, conscious.