, and
hardly knew yet whether they themselves were the same or not. It
seemed, so strangely, as if the clock might be set back somehow, and
yesterday be again; it was so little way off!

Women who had received, perhaps, their last wages for the winter on
Saturday night, sat in their rooms and wondered what would be on
Monday.

Aunt Blin was excited; strong with excitement. She went down-stairs
to see Miss Smalley, who was too tired to sit up.

Out of the fire, Bel Bree and Paulina Smalley had each brought
something that remained by them secretly all this day.

When they had stopped there under those smoked and shattered walls,
and Morris Hewland had drawn Bel's hand within his arm to keep her
from any movement into danger, he had gently laid his own fingers,
in care and caution, upon hers. A feeling had come to them both with
the act, and for a moment, as if the world, with all its great
built-up barriers of stone, had broken down around them, and lay at
their feet in fragments, among which they two stood free together.

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 th