Hal met May with a pale, a haggard face.  He had thought her safe until he saw the stranger fireman on the ladder and learned his errand.  He loved his cousin, and had suffered almost the agonies of death.  May burst into tears.

“O, Hal, what do I not owe to a fireman!”

Hal then recalled for the first time her words of the previous day.

“Do you despise the firemen now, May?”

“Despise them?  God forbid!  How devoted!—­how self sacrificing!—­how humane!—­how noble to risk one’s life for an entire stranger!  O, Harry, I wish we could learn his name, that we might at least thank him.  I shall never forget the first moment when he grasped my hand; it was the first that I had hoped to live.  It seemed to me there was something of a divinity in his eyes as I met their gaze, and I did not fear to descend into the very flames.  But I know now what it was—­the noble, self-forgetting, heaven-trusting soul shining through those eyes, which spoke to mine and bade me fear not, but trust in God.”

Hal was silent for a moment; then he said, slowly and sorrowfully: 

“Every fireman could not have acted thus.  O, May, will you forgive me?  I felt that I could not.  He impressed me with a kind of awe when after the first ladder had fallen he raised a second, as determined as before.  He would have died rather than have given you up!”

It was a long while before the thought of Walter Cunningham crossed the mind of May Edgerton, and then she dwelt upon it but for a moment.  A fireman had become an object of intense interest to her.  Blue coats, brass buttons and epaulets sank into shameful insignificance beside the negligent costume of a fireman, and let Hal call, “Here, May, comes a glazed cap and a red shirt!” and she was at the window in an instant.  One day Hal returned home with a face glowing with excitement.

“I have seen him, uncle!  May, I have seen the stranger fireman!”

“Where? where?” was the quick response.

“There was a tremendous fire down town to-day, burning through from street to street. —­’s book establishment, which has so long enlightened all the country, now illumined a good part of the city in quite another manner.  The paper flew in every direction.  All New York was there, and the stranger among the rest.  Every one saw him, the firemen recognized him, and he worked like a brave fellow.  There was more than one noble deed done to-day, for many a life was in peril.”  Hal’s eyes glistened now, for he had saved a life himself.  “The poor girls who stitched the books had to be taken down by ladders from the upper stories; no one can tell how many were rescued by our hero!  The flames leaped from story to story, resistless, swallowing up everything; the giant work of years, the productions of great minds, all fading, as man must himself, into ashes, ashes!”

“But, Hal, our fireman—­did you not follow him?”

“Indeed I did!—­up through Fulton into Broadway; up, up, up, until he hurried down Waverley Street, I after him, and suddenly disappeared among the old gray walls of the university.  I went in, walked all through the halls, made a dozen inquiries, but in vain.  I reckon he is a will-o’the-wisp.”