wn."

On his way back to the fire from Deerfield Street, the night before, he
had stopped at the hotel, changed his evening clothes for a business
suit, and left his suitcase in his room. It had not occurred to him
that the fire might spread as far as that. Now, his interest quickened
by a touch of amused fear lest he might already be too late, he turned
toward the hotel with faster tread.

The scene at the Aquitaine was one of the utmost panic and confusion.
Only a little way to the north the firemen had been blowing up
buildings in another futile effort to check the fire which would not be
checked, and the dynamiting, coupled with the close approach of the
fire itself, had demoralized most of the hotel attendants. Almost all
the guests had long since taken their belongings and departed.
Porters, waiters, and clerks alike were engaged in collecting whatever
in the building could be moved and carrying it to trucks which were
backed along the curb to receive the property and bear it to a place of
safety.

No one was at the desk; Smith found his own key. The elevator was
piled full of salvaged furniture and curtains, and he walked up to his
room on the fifth floor. There he collected his belongings and
returned to the office. Thinking to himself that he would defer paying
his bill until there was some one in a mental condition capable of
receipting it, he went forth into the street, suitcase in hand.

"Where now?" he thought. The answer was not difficult. There was only
one place where he wanted to go, and he had promised to go there.

To Deerfield Street, then, he went. There he found two anxious women
whose questions he answered as best he could, and whom, after an hour's
rest, he left, having promised that he would warn them if by any chance
the conflagration turned in their direction. Warmed at heart, and much
refreshed by the luncheon they had insisted on his taking, he left the
Maitlands, and turned once again toward the path of the fire.

It had been nearly thirty hours since he had slept; and he found his
eyes hot and dry and heavy in his head. Whether it was the smoke he
had breathed, or the steady strain of the long night, or the lack of
sleep and sheer fatigue, he did not know; but he found developing in
his brain a strange, numb sense of remoteness, a want of coordination
and identity between it and his body. In remembering this day, he was
always afterwards to associate it with a smell of st