nd usual. It might have
been pretending that we were all mistaken. It was as though we had been
merely dreaming our recent excitements. Then, across a field, a villa
began to blaze. Perhaps it had been stunned till then, and had suddenly
jumped into a panic of flames. It was wholly involved in one roll of fire
and smoke, a sudden furnace so consuming that, when it as suddenly
ceased, giving one or two dying spasms, I had but an impression of flames
rolling out of windows and doors to persuade me that what I had seen was
real. The night engulfed what may have been an illusion, for till then I
had never noticed a house at that point.

Whispers began to pass of tragedies that were incredible in their
incidence and craziness. Three children were dead in the rubble of one
near villa. The ambulance that was passing was taking their father to the
hospital. A woman had been blown from her bed into the street. She was
unhurt, but she was insane. A long row of humbler dwellings, over which
the dust was still hanging in a faint mist, had been demolished, and one
could only hope the stories about that place were far from true. We were
turned away when we would have assisted; all the help that was wanted
was there. A stranger offered me his tobacco pouch, and it was then I
found my rainproof was a lady's, and therefore had no pipe in its
pocket.

The sky was suspect, and we watched it, but saw only vacuity till one
long beam shot into it, searching slowly and deliberately the whole
mysterious ceiling, yet hesitating sometimes, and going back on its path
as though intelligently suspicious of a matter which it had passed over
too quickly. It peered into the immense caverns of a cloud to which it
had returned, illuminating to us unsuspected and horrifying possibilities
of hiding-places above us. We expected to see the discovered enemy boldly
emerge then. Nothing came out. Other beams by now had joined the pioneer,
and the night became bewildering with a dazzling mesh of light. Shells
joined the wandering beams, those sparks of orange and red. A world of
fantastic chimney-pots and black rounds of trees leaped into being
between us and the sudden expansion of a fan of yellow flame. A bomb! We
just felt, but hardly heard, the shock of it. A furious succession of
such bursts of light followed, a convulsive opening and shutting of
night. We saw that when midnight is cleft asunder it has a fiery inside.

The eruptions ceased. Idle and ques