Boaz’s muscles tightened all over him.  He had the impulse to start up, to fling open the door, shout into the night, “What are you doing?  Stop there!  Say!  What are you doing and where are you going?”

And as before, the curious impotence of the spectator held him motionless.  He had not stirred in his chair.  And those footfalls, upon which hinged, as it were, that momentous decade of his life, were gone.

There was nothing to listen for now.  Yet he continued to listen.  Once or twice, half arousing himself, he drew toward him his unfinished work.  And then relapsed into immobility.

As has been said, the wind, making little difference to the ears, made all the difference in the world with the sense of feeling and the sense of smell.  From the one important direction of the house.  That is how it could come about that Boaz Negro could sit, waiting and listening to nothing in the shop and remain ignorant of disaster until the alarm had gone away and come back again, pounding, shouting, clanging.

“Fire!” he heard them bawling in the street. “Fire!  Fire!”

Only slowly did he understand that the fire was in his own house.

There is nothing stiller in the world than the skeleton of a house in the dawn after a fire.  It is as if everything living, positive, violent, had been completely drained in the one flaming act of violence, leaving nothing but negation till the end of time.  It is worse than a tomb.  A monstrous stillness!  Even the footfalls of the searchers can not disturb it, for they are separate and superficial.  In its presence they are almost frivolous.

Half an hour after dawn the searchers found the body, if what was left from that consuming ordeal might be called a body.  The discovery came as a shock.  It seemed incredible that the occupant of that house, no cripple or invalid but an able man in the prime of youth, should not have awakened and made good his escape.  It was the upper floor which had caught; the stairs had stood to the last.  It was beyond calculation.  Even if he had been asleep!

And he had not been asleep.  This second and infinitely more appalling discovery began to be known.  Slowly.  By a hint, a breath of rumour here; there an allusion, half taken back.  The man, whose incinerated body still lay curled in its bed of cinders, had been dressed at the moment of disaster; even to the watch, the cuff-buttons, the studs, the very scarf-pin.  Fully clothed to the last detail, precisely as those who had dealings at the bank might have seen Campbell Wood any week-day morning for the past eight months.  A man does not sleep with his clothes on.  The skull of the man had been broken, as if with a blunt instrument of iron.  On the charred lacework of the floor lay the leg of an old andiron with which Boaz Negro and his Angelina had set up housekeeping in that new house.

It needed only Mr. Asa Whitelaw, coming up the street from that gaping “Noah’s Ark” at the bank, to round out the scandalous circle of circumstance.