Paula was thrilled by the American's zeal. He was not content, now that he had begun, to deal with boatloads, but wanted to stir the city. She would have given much to know the exact part of Father Fontanel in this rousing ardor of her new friend. "And you really think Pelée may not hold out?" she asked. "I'm not a monomaniac--at least, not yet," he replied, and his voice suggested a certain pent savagery in his brain. "Call it an experiment that I'm sufficiently interested in to finance. The ways of volcanoes are past the previsions of men. I'd like to get a lot of folks out of the fire-zone, until Pelée is cool--or a billion tons lighter. This ordered-up-to-Nineveh business is out of my line, but it's absorbing. I don't say that Pelée will blow his head off this week or this millennium, but I do say that there are vaults of explosives in that monster, the smallest of which could make this city look like a leper's corpse upon the beach. I say that the internal fires are burning high; that they're already playing about the vital cap; that Pelée has already sprung several leaks, and that the same force which lifted this cheerful archipelago from the depths of the sea is pressing against the craters at this moment. I say that Vesuvius warned before he broke; that Krakatoa warned and then struck; that down the ages these safety valves scattered over the face of the earth have mercifully joggled before giving way; that Pelée is joggling now." "If M. Mondet would write just that," Paula said softly, "I think you would have your exodus." She sought her room shortly afterward. Pelée's moods had been variable that day. The north had been obscured by a fresh fog in the afternoon. The ash and sulphur fumes, cruel to the lungs on the breezy _Morne_, six miles from the craters, gave her an intimation of the anguish of the people in the intervening depression where the city lay. The twilight had brought ease again and a ten-minute shower, so there was real freshness in the early evening. Rippling waves of merriment reached her from the darky quarters, as the young men from the fields came forth to bathe in the sea. Never before was the volatile tropic soul so strongly evidenced for her understanding, as in that glad hour of reaction--simple hearts to glow at little things, whose swift tragedies come and go like blighting winds which, though they may slay, leave no wound; instant to gladden in the groves of serenity, when a black cloud has blown by.