"This is more than a fire," he said gravely, his lips close to the girl's ear. "It is a conflagration. With a thirty-mile wind like this, blowing right into the heart of the city, no one can tell where it will stop. We had better go home." "Go home! Why, what time is it?" asked his companion in surprise. "We've only just gotten here!" "We have been here," said Smith, consulting his watch, "just about an hour and a half. It is now twenty minutes to one." "Twenty minutes to one?" exclaimed Helen. "My mother will certainly think we're lost. But I hate to go. It is magnificent, even if it is terrible." "Yes," said the other. "Just the same, Deerfield Street is the best place for you. I wonder if there's a cab in sight." As it developed, there was none. "Let us try the subway, then," the New Yorker went on. "Perhaps the cars are still running in there." It was a silent couple that made its belated way home to Deerfield Street. Helen's eyes were bright with excitement and her face was flushed; but Smith was almost too preoccupied to notice the added brilliance which this gave to the girl's beauty. He parted from her at the door of the Maitlands' apartment. "You had better go to sleep as soon as you can," he said. "Try to forget all about this business. To-morrow afternoon, when it's over, I'll come around, if I may, and tell you all I know about it." "I shall be home to-morrow afternoon," the girl replied. "But what are you going to do now?" "Oh, I expect I shall go back to the fire for a while," he said carelessly; "but I don't intend to stay up all night. Don't worry. I'll see you to-morrow about four--or earlier, if there's anything of importance to tell you. Good-night." The door closed on him. Meanwhile, furiously driven by the wind out of the north, the fire had taken a giant's dimensions for its own. Shortly after one o'clock the entire block between Tremont and Washington, School and Bromfield was one vast seething furnace from whose throat the fire burst now southward and upward with a roar. The wind was bringing its element of peril to add to the conflagration's own; it caught the white heat from the blazing mass of buildings and started it sweeping southward in a devastating wave of superheated fluid air. As the man on the Common had said, this was a fire--but rather was it Fire, the essence of the god, the very burning breath of Loki. The city was in the hand of something greater than chance and more sinister than circumstance.