the
smoke obscuring them, were as red as that sea beneath which seemed to
devour a house a minute as it rolled out towards the Mission and worked
with all its might among the great business blocks between Market Street
and Telegraph Hill. Some one had estimated that the columns of fire
were seven miles high, and they certainly looked as if they had melted
the very stars. Here and there was a play of blue flames, doubtless from
some explosive substance, and when the dynamite shot the entrails from a
house there was a gorgeous display of fireworks--the golden showers of
sparks symbolizing the treasure that blackened and crumbled in dropping
back to earth.

Before sitting down she had swept the distant hills with her field-glass
and seen thousands of people lying not ten feet apart, like an exhausted
army after battle. In that intense glare she could even study the
eccentric positions of the fallen headstones and monuments in the old
deserted cemeteries--Lone Mountain and Calvary. The cross on the lofty
point of the bare hill behind the Catholic cemetery was red against the
blackness of the west; and hundreds of weary mortals were huddled about
its base. She tried to pity all those terrified uncomfortable creatures
out there, but again the part they played in the greatest natural drama
of modern times occurred to her, and she thought that should console
them.

She wondered at her lack of sentimental regret at the destruction of her
beloved city. But sentiment seemed a mere drop of insult to be cast into
that ocean of calamity. Moreover, she was pricked by a sense that it was
a living sentient thing, that city, and was getting its just dues for
the hearts it had devoured, the lives it had ruined, the merciless
clutch it had kept upon so many that were made for better things. To its
vice she gave little thought; she fancied it was not worse than other
cities, if the truth were known; it was the picturesqueness of its
methods that had held it in the limelight. But that it was one of the
world's juggernauts, and the more cruel for its ever laughing beguiling
face--of that there was no manner of doubt.

She wondered also that she was not in a fever of anxiety about Gwynne.
She had interrogated the sentry and been informed that the automobiles
carrying dynamite dashed straight down to the fire line, often within;
that a number of the soldiers, whose duty it was to lay the explosive,
had been wounded and carried to the hospit