So saying, Lord Desborough took himself off to his well-earned repose; and the two nurses passed the night, sometimes waking and sometimes sleeping, but not disturbed by any strange sounds of explosion, and hopeful, as the night passed without special event, that the fire had been extinguished.

But morning brought appalling accounts of its spread.  Nothing had been done, it seemed, to stay its course.  It had reached Cheapside, and was rushing a headlong course down it, and even the Guildhall, men said, would not escape.  North and west the great, rolling body of the flames was spreading; churches were going down before it, one after the other, as helplessly as the timber and plaster houses, which burned like so much tinder.  Hour after hour as that day passed by fresh and terrible items of news were brought in.  Would anything ever stop the oncoming sea of fire?  Surely—­surely something would be done to save St. Paul’s.  Surely that magnificent and time-honoured structure would not be permitted to perish without some attempt to save it!

Dinah went out at midday for a mouthful of air, leaving Janet in charge of the sick lady.  She turned her steps towards the great edifice towering up in all its grandeur towards the sunny sky.  It was hard indeed to believe that it could succumb to the devouring element, so solid and unconsumable it looked.  Yet, although all men were asserting vehemently that “Paul’s could never burn,” all faces were looking anxious, and all ears were eagerly attuned to catch any new item of news which a messenger or passerby might bring.

The murkiness in the air, faintly discernible even yesterday, had become very marked by this time.  The smell of fire was in the air, although as yet the terrible roaring of the flames, of which all men who had been near it were speaking, had not yet become audible in the Babel of talk going on in the streets and about the great church.  The dean and canons were grouped about the precincts, looking anxiously into each other’s faces, as though to seek to read encouragement from one another.  Nothing was talked of but the fire, the incapacity shown by the civic authorities in dealing with it, and lamentations that good Sir John Lawrence, who had coped so ably with the pestilence last year, should be no longer in office at this second great crisis.

Still it was averred on all hands that something was about to be done; that it was too scandalous to stand by panic stricken whilst the whole city perished.  Every one seemed to have heard talk respecting the demolition or blowing up of houses in the path of the flames; but none could say actually that it had been done, or was about to be done, in any given locality.

Burned out households were pouring continually along the choked thoroughfares, striving to find safe places where they might bestow such goods as they had succeeded in saving.  Charitable persons were occupied in housing and feeding those who had nothing of their own; whilst others, whose fears were on a larger scale, were fleeing altogether away from the city to friends in the country beyond, desiring only to escape the coming judgment, which seemed like that poured out on Sodom.