The heat was less than would have been supposed from such a pyramid of smoking stuff, and, Martin leading by a foot or two, we crossed the threshold. God! What a sight it was! Solignac was no mean house, and there upon the flags lay not alone the roof, but the ruin of two floors heaped in a pile whose ragged crests almost overtopped the jutting points of the nearer joists. Beams, rafters, marble panelling, roof tiles, rubble, rough-hewn masonry that had not seen the light for ten generations, all flung together in an inextricable confusion that beggars words. But whenever I hear it said that the glory of this world perisheth, and my mind gropes for a picture of the last and awful day of the Lord when the elements shall melt in fervent heat, back there comes a vision of that sheer and naked shaft crammed high with formless ruin, its blackened walls hung here or there with tattered curtain-ends, the shredded gauds and remnants of our pride, and over all a heavy pall of smoke whose acrid vapours stank smarting in the nostrils. Over all? No, not quite. At times the drifted reek eddied aside, and through the rift God's clear blue shone down. Martin had entered a foot or two in advance, and that position he still held, one arm thrust out and behind in the unconscious attitude of protection. Suddenly I felt his hand shake with a jump, and his fingers, still unconsciously, closed on my breast, pressing me back. "We have seen enough, Monsieur Gaspard," said he, looking vaguely round, "this thing hurts; why--why--stay any longer?" Why indeed, seeing that I was beginning to understand, and every sharp rasp of the disordered timbers as they settled down was the galling of a wound, every smouldering glow of the grudging fire an eye of derision? Only because his very touch was a warning, and that day was Gaspard Hellewyl's second day of birth. CHAPTER IV BABETTE To every man they come, sooner or later, these second days of birth in which at last he knows himself to be truly alive and with a purpose in the world. In some the ushering into a life of the knowledge of good and evil comes by way of a woman's kiss, in others the pangs are as keen as those that forerun the first gasped filling of the babe's lungs; but whether by way of sweetness or by way of pain, by the glory of love or by the enfibering dignity of grief, by gain or by loss it comes to all. Nor is it a slow process. In an hour that which was not is, and so, being at last a man, the touch of Martin's hand, the trembling of its grip where no grip should have been, was a sinister alert to watchfulness, and I would not go back.