their course as the hour might have warranted.
By an impulse which neither resisted, their footsteps turned
southeastward toward the place where they had first viewed the land of
the fire's reaping. On the steel bridge over the railroad tracks they
found themselves at last.

"We didn't really intend to come here, did we?" asked the girl, with a
smile.

"Somebody must have intended it," argued her companion; "although I
confess that my part in it seemed entirely a passive one. Still, it is
a good place to come, excepting for the cinders which fly into one's
eyes--as one did then."

Northward, under the pale light of the stars, the barren acres
stretched away till they reached the point where the builded city
recommenced. The wind, fallen to a breeze, brought still a faint hint
of smoke out of the ground, as though in insistent reminiscence of the
fire's breath. On the edge of this zone gleamed the city's lights, and
Smith was vaguely reminded of the lights on the Jersey shore as he
could see them from his window.

"Do you remember the night you showed me the lights of New York?" asked
Helen, softly.

"I shall never stop remembering it," he answered. "Some day, when I
get to be so valuable or valueless that I can be spared from the
Guardian, we will go and see the lights of all the other cities of the
world. Shall we?"

"There will be none like yours--like ours."

"As there are no lights for me like those within your eyes."

"But I thought we were going to Robbinsville!" said the girl, "to see a
harness shop."

"We will go there, too," he answered. "Oh, life will be all too short
for you and me!"

It was some time later when the little bridge was left once more to the
cinders and to itself. Behind the backs of the two who walked slowly
homeward, the plain, which once had been a city, lay gray-black in its
ashes beneath the black and gold of the cloud-flecked sky.

***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WHITE ASHES***

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