Her companions assented, and in a short space they were pantingly trudging up the slope, and then, beginning to realize how tired they were, they sat down on a rock near the edge of the summit to rest. Lured by the changing colors of the afterglow they grew silent, awed, perhaps, by the calm that hushes all nature when the light of day is fading into the misty shadows of twilight.
Nathalie had turned from the mountains of pink foam that floated up from the golden west, and was gazing down at the town, where little twinkling lights were beginning to peep here and there between the tree-tops, when Edith suddenly cried, “Oh, look at that smoke!” pointing to a street just below the slope where black columns of smoke were rushing upward.
“Some one must be making a big bonfire,” answered Helen inertly, as her eyes followed the direction of Edith’s finger.
“Why, Helen, that is not a bonfire,” was the Sport’s quick retort. “Oh, I saw a flame shoot up!” she added excitedly.
“So did I!” exclaimed Nathalie, springing on her feet. “And oh, there’s another.”
“Why, the church is on fire!” shouted Edith. “There—don’t you see—the flames are coming out of the back!”
The girls with dazed eyes and beating hearts looked at the old Methodist church, set back from a tree mantled road, within a few feet of a white cottage, the parsonage, that nested like some white bird in the shelter of the waving boughs of the trees.
“Oh, girls,” wailed the Sport, as she turned abruptly and gazed at them with an awe-struck countenance; “it is the church—and the new organ—they were to finish it to-day!” She wrung her hands frantically.
Her companions made no reply, their eyes were glued on the columns of smoke that hurtled in dense masses up into the air.
“I don’t believe any one knows about it!” exclaimed Helen. “Oh, what shall we do? It will be of no use to shout ‘Fire!’ we are too far away.”