A hot, dry day followed on the cool dawn. In his room Dickie lay across his bed. The sun blazed in at his single long window; the big flies that had risen from the dirty yard buzzed and bumped against the upper pane and made aimless, endless, mazy circles above and below one another in the stifling, odorous atmosphere. Dickie lay there like an image of Icarus, an eternal symbol of defeated youth; one could almost see about his slenderness the trailing, shattered wings. He had wept out the first shock of his anger and his shame; now he lay in a despairing stupor. His bruised face burned and ached; his chest felt tight with the aching and burning of his heart. Any suspicion of his father's interpretation of his presence in Sheila's room was mercifully spared him, but the knowledge that he had been brutally jerked back from her pure and patient lips, had been ignominiously punished before her eyes and turned out like a whipped boy—this knowledge was a dreadful torture to his pride. Sheila, to be sure, did not love him even a little bit; she had said so. All the longing and the tumult of his heart during these months had made no more impression upon her than a frantic sea makes upon the little bird at the top of the cliff. She had, he must think, hardly been aware of it. And it was such a terrible and frantic actuality. He had fancied that it must have beaten forever, day by day, night by night, at her consciousness. Can a woman live near so turbulent a thing and not even guess at its existence? Her hand against his heart had lain so limp and dead. He hadn't hoped, of course, that she loved him the way he loved. Probably no one else could feel what he felt and live—so Dickie in young love's eternal fashion believed in his own miracle; but she might have loved him a little, a very little, in time—if she hadn't seen him beaten and shamed and cuffed out of her presence like a dog. Now there was no hope. No hope at all. No hope. Dickie rocked his head against his arm. He had told Sheila that he would take care of her, but he could not even defend himself. He had told her that he would die to save her any suffering, but, before her, he had writhed and gasped helplessly under the weight of another man's hand, his open hand, not even a fist…. No after act of his could efface from Sheila's memory that picture of his ignominy. She had seen him twisted and bent and beaten and thrown away. His father had triumphantly returned to reassure and comfort her for the insult of a boy's impertinence. Would Sheila defend him? Would she understand? Or would she not be justified in contemptuous laughter at his pretensions?

Such thoughts—less like thoughts, however, than like fiery fever fits—twisted and scorched Dickie's mind as he lay there. They burnt into him wounds that for years throbbed slowly into scars.

At noon the heat of his room became even more intolerable than his thoughts. His head beat with pain. He was bathed in sweat, weak and trembling. He dragged himself up, went to his washstand, and dipped his wincing face into the warmish, stale water. His lips felt cracked and dry and swollen. In the wavy mirror he saw a distorted image of his face, with its heavy eyes, scattered hair, and the darkening marks of his father's blows, punctuated by the scarlet scratches of the emerald. He dried his face, loosened his collar, and, gasping for air, came out into the narrow hall.

The hotel was very still. He hurried through it, his face bent, and went by the back way to the saloon. At this hour Sheila was asleep. Carthy would be alone in The Aura and there would be few, if any, customers. Dickie found the place cool and quiet and empty, shuttered from the sun, the air stirred by electric fans. Carthy dozed in his chair behind the bar. He gave Dickie his order, somnambulantly. Dickie took it off to a dim corner and drank with the thirst of a wounded beast.

Three or four hours later he staggered back to his room. A thunderstorm was rumbling and flashing down from the mountains to the north. The window was purple-black, and a storm wind blew the dirty curtains, straight and steady, into the room. The cool wind tasted and smelt of hot dust. Dickie felt his dazed way to the bed and steadied himself into a sitting posture. With infinite difficulty he rolled and lighted a cigarette, drew at it, took it out, tried to put it again between his lips, and fell over on his back, his arm trailing over the edge of the bed. The lighted cigarette slipped from his fingers to the ragged strip of matting. Dickie lay there, breathing heavily and regularly in a drunken and exhausted sleep.

A vivid, flickering pain in his arm woke him. He thought for an instant that he must have died and dropped straight into Hell. The wind still blew in upon him, but it blew fire against him. Above him there was a heavy panoply of smoke. His bedclothes were burning, his sleeve was on fire. The boards of his floor cracked and snapped in regiments of flame. He got up, still in a half stupor, plunged his arm into the water pitcher, saw, with a startled oath, that the woodwork about his door was blazing in long tongues of fire which leaped up into the rafters of the roof. His brain began to telegraph its messages … the hotel was on fire. He could not imagine what had started it. He remembered Sheila.

He ran along the passage, the roar of that wind-driven fire following him as the draft from his window through his opened door gave a sudden impulse to the flames, and he came to Sheila's sitting-room. He knocked, had no answer, and burst in. He saw instantly that she had gone. Her father's picture had been taken, her little books, her sketches, her work-basket, her small yellow vase. Things were scattered about. As he stood staring, a billow of black smoke rolled into the room. He went quickly through the bedroom and the bath, calling "Sheila" in a low, uncertain voice, returned to the sitting-room to find the air already pungent and hot. There was a paper pinned up on the mantel. Sheila's writing marched across it. Dickie rubbed the smoke from his eyes and read:

"I am going away from Millings. And I am not coming back. Amelia may have the things I have left. I don't want them."

This statement was addressed to no one.

"She has gone to New York," thought Dickie. His confused mind became possessed with the immediate purpose of following her. There was an Eastern train in the late afternoon. Only he must have money and it was—most of it—in his room. He dashed back. The passage was ablaze; his room roared like the very heart of a furnace. It was no use to think of getting in there. Well, he had something in his pocket, enough to start him. He plunged, choking, into Sheila's sitting-room again. For some reason this flight of hers had brought back his hope. There was to be a beginning, a fresh start, a chance.

He went over to the chair where Sheila had sat in the comfort, of his arms and he touched the piece of tapestry on its back. That was his good-bye to Millings. Then he fastened his collar, smoothed his hair, standing close before Sheila's mirror, peering and blinking through the smoke, and buttoned his coat painstakingly. There would be a hat downstairs. As he turned to go he saw a little brown leather book lying on the floor below the mantel. He picked it up. Here was something he could take to Sheila. With an impulse of tenderness he opened it. His eyes were caught by a stanza—

"The blessed damozel leaned out
From the gold bar of Heaven;
Her eyes were deeper than the depth
Of waters stilled at even;
She had three lilies in her hand,
And the stars in her hair were seven—"

There are people, no doubt, who will not be able to believe this truthful bit of Dickie's history. The smoke was drifting across him, the roar of the nearing fire was in his ears, he was at a great crisis in his affairs, his heart was hot with wounded love, and his brain hot with whiskey and with hope. Nevertheless, he did now, under the spell of those printed words, which did not even remotely resemble any words that he had ever read or heard before, forget the smoke, the roar, the love, the hope, and, standing below Sheila's mirror, he did read "The Blessed Damozel" from end to end. And the love of those lovers, divided by all the space between the shaken worlds, and the beauty of her tears made a great and mystic silence of rapture about him. "O God!" Dickie said twice as he read. He brushed away the smoke to see the last lines,—"And wept—I heard her tears." The ecstatic pain of beauty gripped him to the forgetfulness of all other pain or ecstasy. "O God!"

He came to with a start, shut the book, stuck it into his pocket, and, crooking his arm over his smarting eyes, he plunged out of the room. Millings had become aware of its disaster. Dickie, fleeing by the back way, leaping dangers and beating through fire, knew by the distant commotion that the Fire Brigade, of which he was a member, was gathering its men for the glory of their name. He saw, too, that with a wind like this to aid the fire, there wasn't a chance for The Aura, and a queer pang of sympathy for his father stabbed him. "It will kill Pap," thought Dickie. Save for this pang, he ran along the road toward the station with a light, adventurous heart. He did not know that he had started the fire himself. The stupor of his sleep had smothered out all memory of the cigarette he had lighted and let fall. Unwittingly Dickie had killed the beauty of his father's dream, and now, just as unwittingly, he was about to kill the object of his father's passion. When he looked back from the station platform, the roof of The Aura was already in a blaze.