The village undertaker was of naturally sober aspect and reflective disposition.  He had always been opposed to cremation, and here was a funeral pile blazing before his eyes.  He, too, had his human sympathies, but in the distance his imagination pictured the final ceremony, and how he himself should figure in a spectacle where the usual centre piece of attraction would be wanting,—­perhaps his own services uncalled for.

Blame him not, you whose garden-patch is not watered with the tears of mourners.  The string of self-interest answers with its chord to every sound; it vibrates with the funeral-bell, it finds itself trembling to the wail of the De Profundis.  Not always,—­not always; let us not be cynical in our judgments, but common human nature, we may safely say, is subject to those secondary vibrations under the most solemn and soul-subduing influences.

It seems as if we were doing great wrong to the scene we are contemplating in delaying it by the description of little circumstances and individual thoughts and feelings.  But linger as we may, we cannot compress into a chapter—­we could not crowd into a volume—­all that passed through the minds and stirred the emotions of the awe-struck company which was gathered about the scene of danger and of terror.  We are dealing with an impossibility:  consciousness is a surface; narrative is a line.

Maurice had given himself up for lost.  His breathing was becoming every moment more difficult, and he felt that his strength could hold out but a few minutes longer.

“Robert!” he called in faint accents.  But the attendant was not there to answer.

“Paolo!  Paolo!” But the faithful servant, who would have given his life for his master, had not yet reached the place where the crowd was gathered.

“Oh, for a breath of air!  Oh, for an arm to lift me from this bed!  Too late!  Too late!” he gasped, with what might have seemed his dying expiration.

“Not too late!” The soft voice reached his obscured consciousness as if it had come down to him from heaven.

In a single instant he found himself rolled in a blanket and in the arms of—­a woman!

Out of the stifling chamber,—­over the burning stairs,—­close by the tongues of fire that were lapping up all they could reach,—­out into the open air, he was borne swiftly and safely,—­carried as easily as if he had been a babe, in the strong arms of “The Wonder” of the gymnasium, the captain of the Atalanta, who had little dreamed of the use she was to make of her natural gifts and her school-girl accomplishments.

Such a cry as arose from the crowd of on-lookers!  It was a sound that none of them had ever heard before or could expect ever to hear again, unless he should be one of the last boat-load rescued from a sinking vessel.  Then, those who had resisted the overflow of their emotion, who had stood in white despair as they thought of these two young lives soon to be wrapped in their burning shroud,—­those stern men—­the old sea-captain, the hard-faced, moneymaking, cast-iron tradesmen of the city counting-room—­sobbed like hysteric women; it was like a convulsion that overcame natures unused to those deeper emotions which many who are capable of experiencing die without ever knowing.