of
fire, but she shall not be burned."

He led the way with Vere, going in front to disarm the suspicion which
he saw plainly lurking in Emilio's eyes. Artois followed with Hermione,
and Gaspare came last. The exit from the enclosure was difficult, as
many people were pouring in through the narrow opening, and others,
massed together outside the wooden barrier, were gazing at the seated
women within; but at length they reached the end of the Piazza, and
caught a glimpse of the Masaniello doll, which faced a portrait of the
Madonna del Carmine framed in fire. Beyond, to the right, above
the heads of the excited multitude, rose the pale-pink globe of the
fire-balloon, and as for a moment they stood still to look at it the
band struck up a sonorous march, the balloon moved sideways, swayed,
heeled over slightly like a sailing-yacht catching the breeze beyond
the harbor bar, recovered itself, and lifted the blazing car above the
gesticulating arms of the people. A long murmur followed it as it glided
gently away, skirting the prodigious belfry with the apparent precaution
of a living thing that longed for, and sought, the dim freedom of the
sky. The children instinctively stretched out their arms to it. All
faces were lifted towards the stars, as if a common aspiration at that
moment infected the throng, a universal, though passing desire to be
free of the earth, to mount, to travel, to be lost in the great spaces
that encircle terrestrial things. At the doors of the trattorie the
people, who had forsaken their snails, stood to gaze, many of them
holding glasses of white wine in their hands. The spighe arrosto, the
watermelons, were for a moment forgotten on the stalls of their vendors,
who ceased from shouting to the passers-by. There was a silence in which
was almost audible the human wish for wings. Presently the balloon,
caught by some vagrant current of air, began to travel abruptly, and
more swiftly, sideways, passing over the city towards its centre. At
once the crowd moved in the same direction. Aspiration was gone. A
violence of children took its place, and the instinct to follow
where the blazing toy led. The silence was broken. People called and
gesticulated, laughed and chattered. Then the balloon caught fire from
the brazier beneath it. A mass of flames shot up. A roar broke from the
crowd and it pressed more fiercely onward, each unit of it longing to
see where the wreck would fall. Already the flames were sin