th turned to find the girl's fingers closed tight upon his arm, and
in her eyes something he had never seen before. She stood still a
moment, and when at last she withdrew her hand, she spoke in a voice so
low that he could barely catch the words.

"Why did you do that?"

"She didn't see the coping," he said, as naturally as he could.

"It might have fallen--on you!"

"Yes," he said; "I suppose it might. But you see, it didn't."

"It might have killed you," she said, still in a low voice.

Smith turned abruptly, and looked at her.

"How much would you have cared, Helen?" he asked.

Even at this moment the trammels of her ancestry were on her; she made
no answer.

"How much would you have cared, dear?" he asked again, gently.

Then at last she raised her eyes, and met his fairly.

"More than anything--more than everything in the world," she said.

The early gray February twilight was closing in upon them when they
left the lifted bridge. They had been there long, yet as they turned
to go, Helen gave one backward look. There, spread away across the
stricken plain, she saw for the last time the prostrate thing which
yesterday had been the living city; and over it, like the winding linen
of a shroud, lay the white ashes in the snow.

CHAPTER XXIV

On the top floor of the Salamander office in William Street a man stood
silent before a map desk on which was laid an open map of the city of
Boston. It was late in the afternoon, and the level rays of the
declining sun came in redly at the window. The man standing at the
desk did not notice them; he was looking stolidly from map to
newspaper, from newspaper to map, as from the hysterical and
conflicting accounts of the conflagration he tried to measure the
extent of the calamity.

The morning papers had told but little, since they had gone to press
when the fire was only a few hours old; and as the day was Sunday, and
a holiday, there had been available only a few of the usual flock of
evening sheets which begin to appear in New York shortly after
breakfast. With one of these by his elbow, in the fading light of the
late February day, F. Mills O'Connor stood, stonily and with hard eyes,
gazing at ruin.

He was alone in the office, since the one other person who had been
with him had, under instructions, departed. This was George McGee, the
Salamander's map clerk for New England. There was no reason whatever
why George should have visited William