Beyond this, there was no order to chronicle.  So far, it seems longer in the telling than it did in the doing.  We had to work “awful quick,” as Mrs. Hobart said.  But the nice and hazardous work was all done.  Even the press that held the table-napery was emptied to the last napkin, and all was safe.

Now the hall doors were thrown open; wagons were driven up to the entrances, and loaded with everything that came first, as things are ordinarily “saved” at a fire.  These were taken over to Mrs. Lewis Marchbanks’s.  Books and pictures, furniture, bedding, carpets; quantities were carried away, and quantities were piled up on the lawn.  The men-servants came and looked after these; they had done all they could elsewhere; they left the work to the firemen now, and there was little hope of saving the house.  The window-frames were smoking, and the panes were cracking with the heat, and fire was running along the piazza roofs before we left the building.  The water was giving out.

After that we had to stand and see it burn.  The wells and cisterns were dry, and the engines stood helpless.

The stable roofs fell in with a crash, and the flames reared up as from a great red crater and whirlpool of fire.  They lashed forth and seized upon charred walls and timbers that were ready, without their touch, to spring into live combustion.  The whole southwest front of the mansion was overswept with almost instant sheets of fire.  Fire poured in at the casements; through the wide, airy halls; up and into the rooms where we had stood a little while before; where, a little before that, the children had been safe asleep in their nursery beds.

Mrs. Marchbanks, like any other burnt-out woman, had gone to the home that offered to her,—­her sister-in-law’s; Olivia and Adelaide were going to the Haddens; the children were at Mrs. Hobart’s; the things that, in their rich and beautiful arrangement, had made home, as well as enshrined the Marchbanks family in their sacredness of elegance, were only miscellaneous “loads” now, transported and discharged in haste, or heaped up confusedly to await removal.  And the sleek servants, to whom, doubtless, it had seemed that their Rome could never fall, were suddenly, as much as any common Bridgets and Patricks, “out of a place.”

Not that there would be any permanent difference; it was only the story and attitude of a night.  The power was still behind; the “Tailor” would sew things over again directly.  Mrs. Roger Marchbanks would be comparatively composed and in order, at Mrs. Lewis’s, in a few days,—­receiving her friends, who would hurry to make “fire-calls,” as they would to make party or engagement or other special occasion visits; the cordons would be stretched again; not one of the crowd of people who went freely in and out of her burning rooms that night, and worked hardest, saving her library and her pictures and her carpets, would come up in cool blood and ring her door-bell now; the sanctity and the dignity would be as unprofanable as ever.