In the wreck of a small fancy grocer's booth down toward the end of the arcade, where the post-office had been, they came upon a stock of goods in glass jars. All the tinned foods had long since perished, but the impermeable glass seemed to have preserved fruits and vegetables of the finer sort, and chipped beef and the like, in a state of perfect soundness. Best of all, they discovered the remains of a case of mineral water. The case had crumbled to dust, but fourteen bottles of water were still intact. "Pile three or four of these into my fur robe here," directed Stern. "Now, a few of the other jars--that's right. To-morrow we'll come down and clean up the whole stock. But we've got enough for now." "We'd best be getting back up the stairs again," said he. And so they started. "Are you going to leave that fire burning?" asked the girl, as they passed the middle of the arcade. "Yes. It can't do any harm. Nothing to catch here; only old metal and cement. Besides, it would take too much time and labor to put it out." Thus they abandoned the gruesome place and began the long, exhausting climb. It must have taken them an hour and a half at least to reach their eerie. Both found their strength taxed to the utmost. Before they were much more than halfway up, the ultimate drop of alcohol had been burned. The last few hundred feet had to be made by slow, laborious feeling, aided only by such dim reflections of the gibbous moon as glimmered through a window, cobweb-hung, or through some break in the walls. At length, however--for all things have an end--breathless and spent, they found their refuge. And soon after that, clad in their savage robes, they supped. Allan Stern, consulting engineer, and Beatrice Kendrick, stenographer, now king and queen of the whole wide world domain (as they feared), sat together by a little blaze of punky wood fragments that flickered on the eroded floor. They ate with their fingers and drank out of the bottles, _sans_ apology. Strange were their speculations, their wonderings, their plans--now discussed specifically, now half-voiced by a mere word that thrilled them both with sudden, poignant emotion. An so an hour passed, and the night deepened toward the birth of another day. The fire burned low and died, for they had little to replenish it with. Down sank the moon, her pale light dimming as she went, her faint illumination wanly creeping across the disordered, wrack-strewn floor. And at length Stern, in the outer office, Beatrice in the other, they wrapped themselves within their furs and laid them down to sleep. Despite the age-long trance from which they both had but so recently emerged, a strange lassitude weighed on them. Yet long after Beatrice had lost herself in dreams, Stern lay and thought strange thoughts, yearning and eager thoughts, there in the impenetrable gloom. CHAPTER VII THE OUTER WORLD