I did not answer, but looked at my grandmother. It seemed to me that the trouble I was dreading would come through her. “Are you not there?” she persisted. “Yes, I am here,” I answered, “but please do not talk to me.” She did not utter another word, but, with her two hands on her lap, sat there for hours. I sketched her strange, prophet-like face. It began to grow dusk, and I thought I would go and dress, after being present at the meal taken by my grandmother and the child. My friend, Rose Baretta, was dining with me that evening, and I had also invited a most charming man, who was very intelligent and distinguished. His name was Charles Haas. Arthur Meyer came, too, a young journalist already very much in vogue. I told them about my forebodings with regard to that day, and begged them not to leave me before midnight. “After that,” I said, “it will not be to-day, and the wicked sprites who are watching me will have missed their chance.” They agreed to humor my fancy, and Arthur Meyer, who ought to have gone to some first night at one of the theaters, gave it up. Dinner was more animated than luncheon had been, and it was nine o’clock when we left the table. Rose Baretta sang us some delightful old songs. I went away for a minute to see that all was right in my grandmother’s room. I found my maid with her head wrapped up in cloths soaked in sedative water. I asked what was the matter, and she said that she had a terrible headache. I told her to prepare my bath and everything for me for the night and then to go to bed. She thanked me and obeyed. I went back to the drawing-room, and sitting down to the piano, played “Il Bacio,” Mendelssohn’s “Bells,” and Weber’s “Last Thought.” I had not come to the end of this last melody, when I stopped, suddenly hearing cries in the street of “Fire! Fire!” “They are shouting ‘Fire!’” exclaimed Arthur Meyer. “That’s all the same to me,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. “It is not midnight yet and I am expecting my own misfortune.” Charles Haas had opened the drawing-room window to see where the shouts were coming from. He stepped out on the balcony, and then came quickly in again. “The fire is here!” he exclaimed. “Look!”