f Boylston Market. A man in a blouse stood there,
ordering the driver of a cart.

"Where is the fire, sir?" asked Miss Smalley, with a ladylike air of
not being used to speak to men in the street, but of this being an
emergency.

"Corner of Kingston and Summer; great granite warehouse, five
stories high," said the man in the blouse, civilly, and proceeding
to finish his order, which was his own business at the moment,
though Boston was burning.

The two women turned round and went back. The heavy bells were
striking three times twelve.

A boy rushed past them at the corner by the great florist's shop. He
was going the other way from the fire, and was impatient to do his
errand and get back. He had a basket of roses to carry; ordered for
some one to whom it would come,--the last commission of that sort
done that night perhaps,--as out of the very smoke and terror of the
hour; a singular lovely message of peace, of the blessed thoughts
that live between human hearts though a world were in ashes. All
through the wild night, those exquisite buds would be silently
unfolding their gracious petals. How strange the bloomed-out roses
would look to-morrow!

All the house in Leicester Place was astir, and recklessly mixed
up, when Miss Smalley and Bel Bree came back. The landlady and her
servant were up in Mr. Sparrow's room, calling to Miss Bree below.
The whole place was full of red fierce light.

Aunt Blin, faithful to Bel's parting order, stood in the spirit of
an unrelieved sentinel, though the whole army had broken camp,
keeping herself steadfastly safe, in her own doorway. To be sure,
there was a draught there, but it was not her fault.

"I _must_ go up and see it," she said eagerly, when Bel appeared.
Bel drew her into the room, put her first into a gray hospital
dressing-gown, then into a waterproof, and after all covered her up
with a striped blue and white bed comforter. She knew she would keep
dodging in and out, and she might as well go where she would stay
quiet.

And so these three women went up-stairs, where they had never been
before. The door of Mr. Hewland's room was open. A pair of slippers
lay in the middle of the floor; a newspaper had fluttered into a
light heap, like a broken roof, beside them; a dressing-gown was
thrown over the back of a chair.

Bel came last, and shut that door softly as she passed, not letting
her eyes intrude beyond the first involuntary glimpse. She was
maidenly shy of t