One need not wait to see the smoke coming through the roof of a house and the flames breaking out of the windows to know that the building is on fire.  Hark!  There is a quiet, steady, unobtrusive, crisp, not loud, but very knowing little creeping crackle that is tolerably intelligible.  There is a whiff of something floating about, suggestive of toasting shingles.  Also a sharp pyroligneous-acid pungency in the air that stings one’s eyes.  Let us get up and see what is going on.—­Oh,—­oh,—­oh! do you know what has got hold of you?  It is the great red dragon that is born of the little red eggs we call sparks, with his hundred blowing red manes, and his thousand lashing red tails, and his multitudinous red eyes glaring at every crack and key-hole, and his countless red tongues lapping the beams he is going to crunch presently, and his hot breath warping the panels and cracking the glass and making old timber sweat that had forgotten it was ever alive with sap.  Run for your life! leap! or you will be a cinder in five minutes, that nothing but a coroner would take for the wreck of a human being!

If any gentleman will have the kindness to stop this run-away comparison, I shall be much obliged to him.  All I intended to say was, that we need not wait for hearts to break out in flames to know that they are full of combustibles and that a spark has got among them.  I don’t pretend to say or know what it is that brings these two persons together;—­and when I say together, I only mean that there is an evident affinity of some kind or other which makes their commonest intercourse strangely significant, as that each seems to understand a look or a word of the other.  When the young girl laid her hand on the Little Gentleman’s arm,—­which so greatly shocked the Model, you may remember,—­I saw that she had learned the lion-tamer’s secret.  She masters him, and yet I can see she has a kind of awe of him, as the man who goes into the cage has of the monster that he makes a baby of.

One of two things must happen.  The first is love, downright love, on the part of this young girl, for the poor little misshapen man.  You may laugh, if you like.  But women are apt to love the men who they think have the largest capacity of loving;—­and who can love like one that has thirsted all his life long for the smile of youth and beauty, and seen it fly his presence as the wave ebbed from the parched lips of him whose fabled punishment is the perpetual type of human longing and disappointment?  What would become of him, if this fresh soul should stoop upon him in her first young passion, as the flamingo drops out of the sky upon some lonely and dark lagoon in the marshes of Cagliari, with a flutter of scarlet feathers and a kindling of strange fires in the shadowy waters that hold her burning image?

—­Marry her, of course?—­Why, no, not of course.  I should think the chance less, on the whole, that he would be willing to marry her than she to marry him.