A boy rushed past them at the corner by the great florist’s shop.  He was going the other way from the fire, and was impatient to do his errand and get back.  He had a basket of roses to carry; ordered for some one to whom it would come,—­the last commission of that sort done that night perhaps,—­as out of the very smoke and terror of the hour; a singular lovely message of peace, of the blessed thoughts that live between human hearts though a world were in ashes.  All through the wild night, those exquisite buds would be silently unfolding their gracious petals.  How strange the bloomed-out roses would look to-morrow!

All the house in Leicester Place was astir, and recklessly mixed up, when Miss Smalley and Bel Bree came back.  The landlady and her servant were up in Mr. Sparrow’s room, calling to Miss Bree below.  The whole place was full of red fierce light.

Aunt Blin, faithful to Bel’s parting order, stood in the spirit of an unrelieved sentinel, though the whole army had broken camp, keeping herself steadfastly safe, in her own doorway.  To be sure, there was a draught there, but it was not her fault.

“I must go up and see it,” she said eagerly, when Bel appeared.  Bel drew her into the room, put her first into a gray hospital dressing-gown, then into a waterproof, and after all covered her up with a striped blue and white bed comforter.  She knew she would keep dodging in and out, and she might as well go where she would stay quiet.

And so these three women went up-stairs, where they had never been before.  The door of Mr. Hewland’s room was open.  A pair of slippers lay in the middle of the floor; a newspaper had fluttered into a light heap, like a broken roof, beside them; a dressing-gown was thrown over the back of a chair.

Bel came last, and shut that door softly as she passed, not letting her eyes intrude beyond the first involuntary glimpse.  She was maidenly shy of the place she had never seen,—­where she had heard the footsteps go in and out, over her head.

The five women crowded about and into Mr. Sparrow’s little dormer window.  Miss Smalley lingered to notice the little black teapot on the grate-bar, where a low fire was sinking lower,—­the faded cloth on the table, and the empty cup upon it,—­the pipe laid down hastily, with ashes falling out of it.  She thought how lonesome Mr. Sparrow was living,—­doing for himself.

All the square open space down through which the blue heavens looked between those great towering buildings, was filled with brightness as with a flood.  The air was lurid crimson.  Every stone and chip and fragment, lay revealed in the strange, transfiguring light.  Away across the stable-roofs, they could read far-off signs painted in black letters upon brick walls.  Church spires stood up, bathed in a wild glory, pointing as out of some day of doom, into the everlasting rest.  The stars showed like points of clear, green, unearthly radiance, against that contrast of fierce red.