ppened or it hadn't happened. A
life-long experience in an environment where only unpleasant things
occurred, where miracles were unknown, had effaced a fleeting, childhood
belief in miracles. Cause and effect were the rule. And if there were a
God who did interfere, why hadn't he interfered before this thing
happened? Then would have been the logical time. Why hadn't he informed
her that in attempting to escape from the treadmill in which he had
placed her, in seeking happiness, she had been courting destruction? Why
had he destroyed Lise? And if there were a God, would he comfort her now,
convey to her some message of his sympathy and love? No such message,
alas, seemed to come to her through the darkness.

After a while--a seemingly interminable while--the siren shrieked, the
bells jangled loudly in the wet air, another day had come. Could she face
it--even the murky grey light of this that revealed the ashes and litter
of the back yard under the downpour? The act of dressing brought a slight
relief; and then, at breakfast, a numbness stole over her--suggested and
conveyed, perchance, by the apathy of her mother. Something had killed
suffering in Hannah; perhaps she herself would mercifully lose the power
to suffer! But the thought made her shudder. She could not, like her
mother, find a silly refuge in shining dishes, in cleaning pots and pans,
or sit idle, vacant-minded, for long hours in a spotless kitchen. What
would happen to her?... Howbeit, the ache that had tortured her became a
dull, leaden pain, like that she had known at another time--how long
ago--when the suffering caused by Ditmar's deception had dulled, when she
had sat in the train on her way back to Hampton from Boston, after seeing
Lise. The pain would throb again, unsupportably, and she would wake, and
this time it would drive her--she knew not where.

She was certain, now, that the presage of the night was true....

She reached Franco-Belgian Hall to find it in an uproar. Anna Mower ran
up to her with the news that dynamite had been discovered by the police
in certain tenements of the Syrian quarter, that the tenants had been
arrested and taken to the police station where, bewildered and terrified,
they had denied any knowledge of the explosive. Dynamite had also been
found under the power house, and in the mills--the sources of Hampton's
prosperity. And Hampton believed, of course, that this was the inevitable
result of the anarchistic preaching