Smith turned abruptly, and looked at her.
"How much would you have cared, Helen?" he asked.
Even at this moment the trammels of her ancestry were on her; she made no answer.
"How much would you have cared, dear?" he asked again, gently.
Then at last she raised her eyes, and met his fairly.
"More than anything—more than everything in the world," she said.
The early gray February twilight was closing in upon them when they left the lifted bridge. They had been there long, yet as they turned to go, Helen gave one backward look. There, spread away across the stricken plain, she saw for the last time the prostrate thing which yesterday had been the living city; and over it, like the winding linen of a shroud, lay the white ashes in the snow.
CHAPTER XXIV
On the top floor of the Salamander office in William Street a man stood silent before a map desk on which was laid an open map of the city of Boston. It was late in the afternoon, and the level rays of the declining sun came in redly at the window. The man standing at the desk did not notice them; he was looking stolidly from map to newspaper, from newspaper to map, as from the hysterical and conflicting accounts of the conflagration he tried to measure the extent of the calamity.
The morning papers had told but little, since they had gone to press when the fire was only a few hours old; and as the day was Sunday, and a holiday, there had been available only a few of the usual flock of evening sheets which begin to appear in New York shortly after breakfast. With one of these by his elbow, in the fading light of the late February day, F. Mills O'Connor stood, stonily and with hard eyes, gazing at ruin.