On the third day following, they stood together on the _Morne d'Orange_--the three. Father Fontanel had been in feverish haste to gaze once more upon his city; while Charter and Paula had a mission among the ruins.... The _Saragossa_ was sitting for a new complexion in the harbor of Fort de France, so they had been driven over from the Capital, along the old sea-road. The wind was still; the sun shone through silent towers of smoke, and it was noon. Sunlight bathed the stripped fields of cane, and, seemingly inseparable from the stillness, brooded upon the blue Caribbean. The wreck of the old plantation-house was hunched closer to the ground. They left Father Fontanel in the carriage, and approached the cistern. Charter halted suddenly at the edge of the stricken lianas, grasping Paula's arm. The well-curbing was broken away, and the earth, for yards surrounding, had caved into the vault. They stood there without speaking for a moment or two, and then he led her back to the carriage.... Father Fontanel did not seem aware of their coming or going, but smiled when they spoke. His eyes, charmed with sunlight, were lost oversea. At last they stood, the priest between them, at the very edge of the _Morne_ overlooking the shadowed _Rue Victor Hugo_--a collapsed artery of the whited sepulchre.... The priest caught his breath; his hands lifted from their shoulders and stretched out over the necropolis. His face was upraised. "God, love the World!" he breathed, and the flesh sank from him.... Much death had dulled their emotions, but this was translation. For an instant they were lifted, exalted, as by the rushing winds of a chariot. * * * * * They did not enter the city that day, but came again, the fourth day after the cataclysm. Out of the heat from the prone city, arose a forbidding breath, so that Paula was prevailed upon to stay behind on the _Morne_.... Sickened and terrified by the actualities, dreadful beyond any imaging, Charter made his way up the cluttered road into _Rue Rivoli_. Saint Pierre, a smoky pestilential charnel, was only alive now through the lamentations of those who had come down from the hills for their dead. The wine-shop had partly fallen in front. The stone-arch remained, but the wooden-door had been levelled and was partially devoured by fire. A breath of coolness still lingered in the dark place, and the fruity odor of spilled wine mingled revoltingly with the heaviness of death. The ash-covered floor was packed hard, and still wet from the gusts of rain that had swept in through the open door and the broken-backed roof; stained, too, from the leakage of the casks. Charter's boot touched an empty bottle, and it wheeled and careened across the stones--until he thought it would never stop.... Steady as a ticking clock, came the "drip-drip" of liquor, escaping through a sprung seam from somewhere among the merciful shadows, where the old soldier of France had fallen from his chair.