"Must be a fire in the Fair grounds," he thought. "I wonder if the girls know."
They were coming out of their door, with their outside wraps on, when Van Tassel came up the steps, and they gave him a greeting in which excitement and cordiality mingled.
"There is a fire in the Fair," they all three said at once.
"You will take me down there, Jack," exclaimed Mildred. "Clover was going, but she hasn't been well and she ought not to."
Clover protested faintly, suggesting some of the rites of hospitality for Jack's benefit; but he would hear nothing save carrying out Mildred's wishes, and after taking a moment to deposit his bag in the hall, he set off beside her.
"How is Gorham, I wonder?" murmured Clover with a comical little smile and plaintive raised eyebrows, as she looked after the figures retreating into the dark. "I feel as if I had been in a whirlwind." She looked toward the once gay hotel; now, its many sightless eyes gazed blankly southward. "I will go there," she exclaimed with sudden determination; and reëntering the house, she called Jeanie, and made her hurry into her wraps. The housekeeper obeyed, with many a fussy groan over her mistress' caprice, and soon they were walking northward.
They ascended the dark stairway to the piazza of the hotel, and peered through the door at the office, where one dim light showed. Clover was a bit frightened, but she knocked on the glass. A man appeared behind the office desk, and, picking up the lantern which was the vast hotel's single attempt at illumination, advanced through dark spaces, casting strange shadows on the marble floor as he came.
"May we look at the fire from here?" asked Clover, wishing Gorham were with her rather than Jeanie.
"Yes; I see they've got a fire down there," the man remarked imperturbably, but he stood back for them to enter, and then clanged the heavy door behind them. It echoed in the big empty hall, and Jeanie looked so discomfited that Clover smiled, though she herself thought the situation rather eerie.
The last time she had stood here, the place had been ablaze with electric light, and gay with music and guests. She had ascended with her friends to a balcony to view the lighted White City in the zenith of its beauty, and to revel in the fiery marvels which mirrored themselves in the lake. It flashed into her memory how enthusiastic the crowds had been over the rising of a slender cylinder of light which poised itself aloft, then slowly unrolled until the stars and stripes appeared in the heavens. She could hear again the patriotic salutes from a congregation of boats as Old Glory sailed away across the lake.