Angela sat watching him, with her gaze rooted to that dark countenance and bare head, on which the iron-grey hair waved thick and strong, for Fareham had never consented to envelop his neck and shoulders in a mantle of dead men’s tresses, and wore his own hair after the fashion of Charles the First’s time. So intent was her watch, that the objects on either shore passed her like shadows in a dream. The Primate’s palace on her right hand, as the boat swept round that great bend which the river makes opposite Lambeth Marsh; on her left, as they neared London, the stern grandeur of the Abbey and St. Margaret’s. It was only as they approached Whitehall that she became aware of a light upon the water which was not the reflection of daybreak, and, looking suddenly up, she saw the fierce glare of a conflagration in the eastern sky, and cried— “There is a fire, my lord!—a great fire, I doubt, in the city.” The long roof and massive tower of St Paul’s stood dark against the vivid splendour of that sky, and every timber in the scaffolding showed like a black lattice across the crimson and sulphur of raging flames. Fareham looked round, without moving his sculls from the rowlocks. “A great fire in verity, mistress! Would God it meant the fulfilment of prophecy!” “What prophecy, sir?” “The end of the world, with which we are threatened in this year. God, how the flames rage and mount! Would it were the great fire, and He had come to judge us, and to empty the vials of His wrath upon profligates and seducers!” He looked at the face opposite, radiant with reflected rose and gold, supernal in that strange light, and, oh, so calm in every line and feature, the large dark eyes meeting his with a gaze that seemed to him half indignant, half reproachful. “Oh, what hypocrites these women are!” he told himself. “And all alike—all alike. What comedians! For acting one need not go to the Duke’s or the King’s. One may see it at one’s own board, by one’s own hearth. Acting, nothing but acting! And I thought that in the universal mass of falsehood and folly there were some rare stars, dwelling apart here and there, and that she was one of them. An idle dream! Nature has made them all in one mould, and it is but by means and opportunity that they differ.” Higher and higher rose that vast sheet of vivid colour; and now every tower and steeple was bathed in rosy light, or else stood black against the radiant sky—towers illuminated, towers in densest shadow; the slim spars of ships showing as if drawn with pen and ink on a sulphur background—a scene of surpassing splendour and terror. Fareham had seen Flemish villages blazing, Flemish citadels exploding, their fragments hurled skyward in a blue flame of gunpowder; but never this vast arch of crimson, glowing and growing before his astonished gaze, as he paddled the boat inshore, and stood up to watch the great disaster.