Blessed Damozel” from end to end.  And the love of those lovers, divided by all the space between the shaken worlds, and the beauty of her tears made a great and mystic silence of rapture about him.  “O God!” Dickie said twice as he read.  He brushed away the smoke to see the last lines,—­“And wept—­I heard her tears.”  The ecstatic pain of beauty gripped him to the forgetfulness of all other pain or ecstasy.  “O God!”

He came to with a start, shut the book, stuck it into his pocket, and, crooking his arm over his smarting eyes, he plunged out of the room.  Millings had become aware of its disaster.  Dickie, fleeing by the back way, leaping dangers and beating through fire, knew by the distant commotion that the Fire Brigade, of which he was a member, was gathering its men for the glory of their name.  He saw, too, that with a wind like this to aid the fire, there wasn’t a chance for The Aura, and a queer pang of sympathy for his father stabbed him.  “It will kill Pap,” thought Dickie.  Save for this pang, he ran along the road toward the station with a light, adventurous heart.  He did not know that he had started the fire himself.  The stupor of his sleep had smothered out all memory of the cigarette he had lighted and let fall.  Unwittingly Dickie had killed the beauty of his father’s dream, and now, just as unwittingly, he was about to kill the object of his father’s passion.  When he looked back from the station platform, the roof of The Aura was already in a blaze.

PART TWO

THE STARS

CHAPTER I

THE HILL

Thatcher spoke to his horses, now fatherly, now masterly, now with a professorial sarcasm:  “Come on, Monkey, there’s a good girl!  Get out of that, you Fox!  Dern you!  You call that pulling?  It’s my notion of layin’ off for the day.”  Even at its most urgent, his voice was soft, hushed by the great loneliness of this canon up which he slowly crept.  Monkey and Fox had been plodding, foot by foot, the creaking wagon at their heels, since dawn.  It was now ten o’clock and they were just beginning to climb.  The Hill, that looked so near to the mesa above Hudson’s yard, still stood aloof.  It had towered there ahead of them as they jerked and toiled across the interminable flat in their accompanying cloud of dust.  The great circle of the world had dwarfed them to a bitter insignificance:  a team of crickets, they seemed, driven by a gnome.  The hushed tone of Thatcher’s voice made unconscious tribute to this immensity.