he place she had never seen,--where she had heard
the footsteps go in and out, over her head.

The five women crowded about and into Mr. Sparrow's little dormer
window. Miss Smalley lingered to notice the little black teapot on
the grate-bar, where a low fire was sinking lower,--the faded cloth
on the table, and the empty cup upon it,--the pipe laid down
hastily, with ashes falling out of it. She thought how lonesome Mr.
Sparrow was living,--doing for himself.

All the square open space down through which the blue heavens looked
between those great towering buildings, was filled with brightness
as with a flood. The air was lurid crimson. Every stone and chip and
fragment, lay revealed in the strange, transfiguring light. Away
across the stable-roofs, they could read far-off signs painted in
black letters upon brick walls. Church spires stood up, bathed in a
wild glory, pointing as out of some day of doom, into the
everlasting rest. The stars showed like points of clear, green,
unearthly radiance, against that contrast of fierce red.

It surged up and up, as if it would over-boil the very stars
themselves. It swayed to right,--to left; growing in an awful bulk
and intensity, without changing much its place, to their eyes, where
they stood. On the tops of the high Apartment Hotel, and all the
flat-roofed houses in Hero and Pilgrim streets, were men and women
gazing. Their faces, which could not have been discerned in the
daylight, shone distinct in this preternatural illumination. Their
voices sounded now and then, against the yet distant hum and crackle
of the conflagration, upon the otherwise still air. The rush had,
for a while, gone by. The streets in this quarter were empty.

Grand and terrible as the sight was to them in Leicester Place, they
could know or imagine little of what the fire was really doing.

"It backs against the wind," they heard one man say upon the
stable-roof.

They could not resist opening the window, just a little, now and
then, to listen; though Bel would instantly pull Aunt Blin away, and
then they would put it down. Poor Aunt Blin's nose grew very cold,
though she did not know it. Her nose was little and sensitive. It is
not the big noses that feel the cold the most. Aunt Blin took cold
through her face and her feet; and these the dressing-gown, and the
waterproof, and the comforter, did not protect.

"It must have spread among those crowded houses in Kingston and
South streets," Aun