In a state of suppressed excitement that held her nerves at the bursting point, she sat there watching a spectacle such as is the lot of few to see.
At first the blaze, flaming fiercely, fanned by the off shore breeze, went raging out to sea. But at last, all at once, as if awed by this sublime spectacle, the death of a great ship, the wind dropped and the blaze, like flames of some gigantic candle, rose up—up—up until it seemed to the watching girl that they must reach the sky and set the planets, the stars, the very universe aflame.
As she sat there, lips apart, pupils dilated, motionless, watching, the spectacle became a thing of many dreams. Now the flames were but the burning of a stupendous campfire, the dark bulk that stood half concealed, half revealed, docks, lighthouses, islands, were figures of reposing and crouching giants.
Then the flames became a ladder of fire. Down this ladder, a thousand angels, whose wings could not be touched by fire, swarmed.
The ship burned with a clear, red flame now. The water about her became a pool of red and old rose. At the edge of this pool small bulks moved, motor boats, row boats, launches.
“What can they do?” she murmured. “Nothing. Let them go to bed. They are like hunting hounds, in at the death.”
She wondered vaguely if the person responsible for this catastrophe were circling there, too. Strangely enough, she fancied she could pick the man, a dark-faced foreigner with a shock of black hair.
“The face-in-the-fire,” she thought.
For a moment she thought of dressing, of launching her punt and going on a still hunt for the man. In the end, she sat there watching to the end the death of much that was dear to her.
The end came with a suddenness that was startling. The masts had fallen, one at a time. Slowly, regularly, like seamen dropping from a ladder into a dory, they fell to send sparks shooting skyward. Then, with a thunder that was deafening, there came the shock of a terrific explosion.