ock before they separated for the remainder of the
night.

Code's room, with its big mahogany double bed, was given over to
Nellie and the children while he gladly resigned himself to the humpy
plush sofa.

By this time they had received news from half a dozen neighbors that
Bill Boughton's general store had been only half destroyed and that
the contents had all been saved. The wharfs and fish-houses were at
last burning and property on the leeward side of the flames was
declared to be safe.

A general exodus began along the King's Road.

Men who had galloped up from Great Harbor, with an ax in one hand and
a bucket in the other, mounted their horses and rode away. Others from
Hayward's Cove and Castalia, who had driven in buggies and buckboards,
collected their families and departed. The King's Road was the scene
of a long procession, as though the people of Freekirk Head were
evacuating the town.

A detachment of men under Squire Hardy's orders remained about the
danger zone ready to check any further advance of the flames or to
rouse the town to further resistance should this become necessary. But
for the most part the people of the village returned to their homes.

Wide-awake and nervous, Schofield lay open-eyed upon the couch while
unbidden thoughts raced through his brain.

The very fact of his sleeping on the plush couch was enough to bring
to his mind the memory of one whom he had irretrievably lost on this
memorable night. Was she not at this moment under his own roof,
miserable and nearly destitute? He knew that, as long as he might
live, his humble room up-stairs would never be the same again.

It had been made a place sweet and full of wonder by the very fact
that she was in it. Never again, he knew, could he enter it without
its being faintly fragrant of her who, all his life, he had considered
the divinest created thing on earth. By her presence she had
sanctified it and made of it a shrine for his meditative and wakeful
hours.

Ever since they had gone to school together, hand in hand, the names
of Nellie Tanner and Code Schofield had been linked in the mouths of
Grande Mignon busybodies. Living all their lives two doors away, they
had grown up in that careless intimacy of constant association that
is unconscious of its own power until such intimacy is removed.

To-night the shock had come.

It was not that Code had taken for granted that Nellie would marry
him. Never in his life had he tol