By that time he was putting on his overcoat.

“Where are you going, Carl,” demanded the mother, evidently more scared by his going out than by the fire.

“To the bank,” answered the father, grimly.

“You mustn’t, Carl!  I won’t let you go out!  Think if anything should happen to you!”

“Nonsense,” he said.  “I am in no danger—­but I must see what’s happening to the bank, and help if things have to be taken out.”

“Carl, Carl....” was all the mother could get over her lips.

“Don’t worry, Ann,” he pleaded, bending over her for a minute, and his voice took on a tenderness Keith seemed never to have heard before.  “I shall be careful, but I must go.  If the fire should come this way, I’ll be back in time to help you all out.”

She tried to cling to him, but he freed himself with gentle firmness.  In a minute more he was gone, and in the next second Keith’s mother was at the window looking out, though she had only her night-linen on and it was late autumn.  Unobserved and unrebuked, Keith joined her, and when he looked up at the sky, his heart almost stopped beating.

A ghastly stillness reigned outside—­except when it was merely accentuated by the occasional sound of hurried steps along the street at the top of the lane.  Finally some one was heard passing through the lane itself.

“Please,” Keith’s mother cried at the top of her voice.  “What is it?”

“It’s the German Church,” a voice responded from below.  “The whole spire is flaming like a torch.”

“Are we in danger down here?”

“Hard to tell.  It depends on which way the spire falls.  If it falls outward, I fear the whole city will go.”

Then he walked off.

By that time the servant girl had come in weeping as if she had just heard her death-doom announced, and from the Granny was calling to them: 

“You’ll freeze to death, all of you, if you don’t put on some clothes.”

So they dressed, though difficulty, and then there was nothing to do but to wait.  The mother was at the window all the time, every few minutes she said to the boy: 

“Oh, I hope nothing happens to your father!”

At first it scared him more than did the light.  But after a while it began to have an opposite effect.  He seemed to grow stiff and hard.  The excitement of the fire was still there, but it was overlaid and almost neutralized by a vast impatience that seemed to take possession of his whole being.  He felt that if his mother made the same remark once more, he should yell with rage and agony, and to save himself, he joined Granny in the kitchen, where the girl had started a fire in order to make some coffee.

The sky in that quarter was just as bright as in front, and no light was needed in the room.

Suddenly he heard his mother cry out: 

“Oh.”

At the same time the brightness seemed to increase to something more than daylight.