The music-mistress and the watchmaker, looking in upon their place of prayer, seeing it empty and eaten out by the yet lingering tongues of fire, had exchanged those words about the things that are.  For a minute, through the emptiness, they reached into the eternal deep; for a minute their simple souls felt themselves, over the threshold of earthly ruin, in the spaces where there is no need of a temple any more; they forgot their worn and far-spent lives,—­each other’s old and year-marked faces; they were as two spirits, met without hindrance or incongruity, looking into each other’s spiritual eyes.

Poor old Miss Smalley, when she came home and took off her hood before her little glass, and saw how pale she was with her night’s watching and excitement, and how the thin gray hairs had straggled over her forehead, came back with a pang into the flesh, and was afraid she had been ridiculous; but lying tired upon her bed, in the long after hours of the day, she forgot once more what manner of outside woman she was, and remembered only, with a pervading peace, how the watchmaker had spoken.

Night came.  The pillar of smoke that had gone up all day, turned again into a pillar of fire, and stood in the eastern heavens.

The time of safety, when there had been no flaming terror, was already so far off, that people, fearing this night to surrender themselves to sleep, wondered that in any nights they had ever dared,—­wondered that there had ever been anything but fear and burning, in this great, crowded city.

The guards paced the streets; the roll of wagons quieted.  The stricken town was like a fever patient seized yesterday with a sudden, devouring rage of agony,—­to-day, calmed, put under care, a rule established, watchers set.

Miss Smalley went from window to window as the darkness—­and the apparition of flame—­came on.  Rested by the day’s surrender to exhaustion, she was alert and apprehensive and excited now.

“It will be sure to burst out again,” she said; “it always does.”

“Don’t say so to Aunt Blin,” whispered Bel.  “Look at her cheeks, and her eyes.  She is sick-abed this minute, and she will keep up!”

At nine o’clock, the very last thing, she spoke with the music-mistress again, at the door.  Miss Smalley kept coming up into the passage to look out at that end window.

“I don’t mean to get up if it does burn,” Bel said, resolutely.  “It won’t come here.  We ought to sleep.  That’s our business.  There’ll be enough to do, maybe, afterwards.”

But for all that, in the dead of the night, she was roused again.

A sound of bells; a long alarm of which she lost the count; a great explosion.  Then that horrible cataract of flame and sparks overhanging the stars as it did before, and paling them out.

It seemed as if it had always been so; as if there had never been a still, dark heaven under which to lie down tranquilly and sleep.