She opened the door and passed out.  He listened until the trail of her wet skirt had descended the stairs, and the street door had closed behind her.  Then he went back to his table and began collecting his papers and putting them away in his trunks, which he packed feverishly, yet with a set and determined face.  He wrote one or two letters, which he sealed and left upon his table.  He then went to his bedroom and deliberately shaved off his disguising beard.  Had he not been so preoccupied in one thought, he might have been conscious of loud voices in the street and a hurrying of feet on the wet sidewalk.  But he was possessed by only one idea.  He must see his wife that evening!  How, he knew not yet, but the way would appear when he had reached his office in the building opposite hers.  Three hours had elapsed before he had finished his preparations.  On going downstairs he stopped to give some directions to the porter, but his room was empty; passing into the street he was surprised to find it quite deserted, and the shops closed; even a drinking saloon at the corner was quite empty.  He turned the corner of the street, and began the slight descent towards his office.  To his amazement the lower end of the street, which was crossed by the thoroughfare which was his destination, was blocked by a crowd of people.  As he hurried forward to join them he suddenly saw, moving down that thoroughfare, what appeared to his startled eyes to be the smokestacks of some small, flat-bottomed steamer.  He rubbed his eyes; it was no illusion, for the next moment he had reached the crowd, who were standing half a block away from the thoroughfare, and on the edge of a lagoon of yellow water, whose main current was the thoroughfare he was seeking, and between whose houses, submerged to their first stories, a steamboat was really paddling.  Other boats and rafts were adrift on its sluggish waters, and a boatman had just landed a passenger in the backwater of the lower half of the street on which he stood with the crowd.

Possessed of his one idea, he fought his way desperately to the water edge and the boat, and demanded a passage to his office.  The boatman hesitated, but James Smith promptly offered him double the value of his craft.  The act was not deemed singular in that extravagant epoch, and the sympathizing crowd cheered his solitary departure, as he declined even the services of the boatman.  The next moment he was off in mid-stream of the thoroughfare, paddling his boat with a desperate but inexperienced hand until he reached his office, which he entered by the window.  The building, which was new and of brick, showed very little damage from the flood, but in far different case was the one opposite, on which his eyes were eagerly bent, and whose cheap and insecure foundations he could see the flood was already undermining.  There were boats around the house, and men hurriedly removing trunks and valuables, but the one figure he expected