"_Fire_!" he heard them bawling in the street. "_Fire! Fire_!"
Only slowly did he understand that the fire was in his own house.
There is nothing stiller in the world than the skeleton of a house
in the dawn after a fire. It is as if everything living, positive,
violent, had been completely drained in the one flaming act of
violence, leaving nothing but negation till the end of time. It is
worse than a tomb. A monstrous stillness! Even the footfalls of the
searchers can not disturb it, for they are separate and superficial.
In its presence they are almost frivolous.
Half an hour after dawn the searchers found the body, if what was
left from that consuming ordeal might be called a body. The
discovery came as a shock. It seemed incredible that the occupant of
that house, no cripple or invalid but an able man in the prime of
youth, should not have awakened and made good his escape. It was the
upper floor which had caught; the stairs had stood to the last. It
was beyond calculation. Even if he had been asleep!
And he had not been asleep. This second and infinitely more
appalling discovery began to be known. Slowly. By a hint, a breath
of rumour here; there an allusion, half taken back. The man, whose
incinerated body still lay curled in its bed of cinders, had been
dressed at the moment of disaster; even to the watch, the
cuff-buttons, the studs, the very scarf-pin.
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