“Hello—­hello—­help, in God’s name!” wailed the woman.  “There’s a dead girl in here and a man and—­and see yonder dead men lying in the street and dead horses—­for the love of God go and bring the officers——­” And the words trailed off into hysterical tears.

He wheeled the car in a sudden circle, running over the still body of a child and leaping on the curb.  Then he rushed up the steps and tried the door and rang violently.  There was a long pause, but at last the heavy door swung back.  They stared a moment in silence.  She had not noticed before that he was a Negro.  He had not thought of her as white.  She was a woman of perhaps twenty-five—­rarely beautiful and richly gowned, with darkly-golden hair, and jewels.  Yesterday, he thought with bitterness, she would scarcely have looked at him twice.  He would have been dirt beneath her silken feet.  She stared at him.  Of all the sorts of men she had pictured as coming to her rescue she had not dreamed of one like him.  Not that he was not human, but he dwelt in a world so far from hers, so infinitely far, that he seldom even entered her thought.  Yet as she looked at him curiously he seemed quite commonplace and usual.  He was a tall, dark workingman of the better class, with a sensitive face trained to stolidity and a poor man’s clothes and hands.  His face was soft and slow and his manner at once cold and nervous, like fires long banked, but not out.

So a moment each paused and gauged the other; then the thought of the dead world without rushed in and they started toward each other.

“What has happened?” she cried.  “Tell me!  Nothing stirs.  All is silence!  I see the dead strewn before my window as winnowed by the breath of God,—­and see——­” She dragged him through great, silken hangings to where, beneath the sheen of mahogany and silver, a little French maid lay stretched in quiet, everlasting sleep, and near her a butler lay prone in his livery.

The tears streamed down the woman’s cheeks and she clung to his arm until the perfume of her breath swept his face and he felt the tremors racing through her body.

“I had been shut up in my dark room developing pictures of the comet which I took last night; when I came out—­I saw the dead!

“What has happened?” she cried again.

He answered slowly: 

“Something—­comet or devil—­swept across the earth this morning and—­many are dead!”

“Many?  Very many?”

“I have searched and I have seen no other living soul but you.”

She gasped and they stared at each other.

“My—­father!” she whispered.

“Where is he?”

“He started for the office.”

“Where is it?”

“In the Metropolitan Tower.”

“Leave a note for him here and come.”

Then he stopped.

“No,” he said firmly—­“first, we must go—­to Harlem.”

“Harlem!” she cried.  Then she understood.  She tapped her foot at first impatiently.  She looked back and shuddered.  Then she came resolutely down the steps.