Gorham still stared absently at the great red, velvety leaves. He was satisfied with the amount for which the property was insured; he was busy with his plans for the future; he was already tired of the subject of the fire; he believed it the result of an accident or the carelessness of the night watchman. This official had testified at the trial that morning that an acquaintance, a minor employee of the theatre, a scene-shifter, passing on the street late in the night, had paused on the corner for a casual friendly word; he had been seized with the conviction that he smelled fire, and then opining that it issued from the basement of the theatre, he had accompanied the night watchman thither, and they were turning over the varied assortments in the property-room and hunting among the tangles of ropes and lifts and stage machinery, and examining the furnace-room and pervading the place while the house was actually in flames above their heads. The scene-shifter, too, had given testimony to the same effect. In this connection Gorham was recollecting the difficulty which he had experienced, in common with every householder perhaps, in forcing employees of whatever sort to observe even a minimum of caution in dealing with fire and lights. He thought the police were on a false scent and were magnifying the clue of the chance entrance of the boy--a child's device to steal a sight at a "show"--into a complicity with house-breakers and thieves and incendiaries. The street was unusually quiet at this moment. Then a great transfer rattled by, its jarring turbulence filling the sunshine that blazed beyond the scalloped shadow of the awning, and calling up a hollow, tremulous echo from a cave which it was said lay under the town. What strange, high-colored dreams of the outside world must these prosaic vibrations take quivering into the darkened existence of the troglodytes--if any such mystic cave-dwellers could be here! What shadowy, picturesque fancies the echo led coyly out in the sunshine! The manager took his cigar from his lips and gazed pensively into the air. He had been thinking of trying the "spectacular" in a certain sort and on a grand scale when he should rebuild. Here was an idea,--some fantastic play, an opera perhaps, light but romantic, which should call for caverns, gnomes, grotesque conceits, subterranean splendors--all wrought with the newest mechanical contrivances and electric effects. He was trying to recall some story, some old romance, some half-forgotten heroic poem which would lend itself to these modern facilities of representation. He would not have believed then that he was never to rebuild his theatre,--that in less than an hour the thought would be odious to him.