with lithe limbs and sweet young voices were singing
and circling before him. I was glad to have him back in mother's room,
and to him and to those who were to be his care-takers for the winter I
gravely repeated, "I want everything kept just as it is. I want to feel
that we can come back to it at any time and find every object in place,
including the fire."

To which father replied, "I don't want to change it. It suits me."

The children, darting out of the music-room (which was the
"dressing-room" of their stage), swung their Japanese lanterns, enacting
once again their pretty little play, and then our guests rose two by two
and went away. Zulime led the march to bed, the lights were turned out
and the clear, crisp, odorous October night closed over our scene.

As I was about to leave the low-ceiled library, I took another look at
it saying to myself, "It seems absurd to abandon this roomy, human
habitation for a cramped little dwelling on a city lot." But with a
sense of what the city offered by way of compensation, I climbed the
old-fashioned, crooked, narrow stairway to my bed in the chamber over
the music-room, content to say good-by for the winter....

It was dusky dawn when I awoke, with a sense of alarm, unable to tell
what had awakened me. For several seconds I lay in confusion and vague
suspense. Then a cry, a strange cry--a woman's scream--arose, followed
by a rush of feet. Other cries, and the shrieks of children succeeded
close, one upon the other.

My first thought was, "Constance has fallen." I sprang from my bed and
was standing in the middle of the room when I heard Zulime cross the
floor beneath me, and a moment later she called up the stairway,
"Hamlin, _Fan has set the house on fire_!"

My heart was gripped as if by an icy hand for I knew how inflammable the
whole building was, and without stopping to put on coat or slippers, I
ran swiftly down the stairs. As I entered the sitting-room so silent, so
peaceful, so undisturbed, it seemed that my alarm was only a part of a
dream till the sobbing of my daughters and my wife's voice at the
telephone calling for help, convinced me of the frightful reality. I
heard, too, the ominous crackling of flames in the kitchen.

Pushing open the swinging door I confronted a wall of smoke. One-half of
the floor was already consumed, and along the linoleum a sharply-defined
line of fire told that it rose from burning oil--and yet I could not
quite believe it, ev