l, it was mechanical, it had either happened or it
hadn't happened. A life-long experience in an environment where only
unpleasant things occurred, where miracles were unknown, had effaced a
fleeting, childhood belief in miracles. Cause and effect were the rule.
And if there were a God who did interfere, why hadn't he interfered
before this thing happened? Then would have been the logical time. Why
hadn't he informed her that in attempting to escape from the treadmill
in which he had placed her, in seeking happiness, she had been courting
destruction? Why had he destroyed Lise? And if there were a God, would
he comfort her now, convey to her some message of his sympathy and love?
No such message, alas, seemed to come to her through the darkness.

After a while--a seemingly interminable while--the siren shrieked, the
bells jangled loudly in the wet air, another day had come. Could she
face it--even the murky grey light of this that revealed the ashes and
litter of the back yard under the downpour? The act of dressing
brought a slight relief; and then, at breakfast, a numbness stole over
her--suggested and conveyed, perchance, by the apathy of her mother.
Something had killed suffering in Hannah; perhaps she herself would
mercifully lose the power to suffer! But the thought made her shudder.
She could not, like her mother, find a silly refuge in shining dishes,
in cleaning pots and pans, or sit idle, vacant-minded, for long hours in
a spotless kitchen. What would happen to her?... Howbeit, the ache that
had tortured her became a dull, leaden pain, like that she had known
at another time--how long ago--when the suffering caused by Ditmar's
deception had dulled, when she had sat in the train on her way back
to Hampton from Boston, after seeing Lise. The pain would throb again,
unsupportably, and she would wake, and this time it would drive her--she
knew not where.

She was certain, now, that the presage of the night was true....

She reached Franco-Belgian Hall to find it in an uproar. Anna Mower ran
up to her with the news that dynamite had been discovered by the police
in certain tenements of the Syrian quarter, that the tenants had
been arrested and taken to the police station where, bewildered and
terrified, they had denied any knowledge of the explosive. Dynamite had
also been found under the power house, and in the mills--the sources of
Hampton's prosperity. And Hampton believed, of course, that this was
the inevita