Page:Tongues of Flame (1924).pdf/346

 less like a pelican on a rock, gazing downward into the vast pit of flame; and beside him, sunk into a chair, sat the considerable bulk of his wife, swaying occasionally as with inconsolable grief.

"Napoleon watching the burning of Moscow!" muttered Henry, gloating in spite of himself.

But Billie! Where was she? He strained his eyes for a sight of her, his ears for a tone of her voice; but got neither. Satisfied that she was not upon the veranda, he moved around the corner of the house to get a view of that small balcony which looked out from her own suite in the northeast gable.

"Poor, poor girl! She's just too crushed to see anybody at all," he reasoned. "Nobody would know how to talk to her but me anyway. . . . I could do a Romeo and climb up to that balcony," he decided, contemplating the mass of creepers that grew past it to the roof.

Henry had not heard a car shoot under the porte-cochère because the whole length and bulk of the house lay between. It was the coupé coming back. Still breathless from her visit to the jail, Billie's instinct was to avoid those groups upon the piazza, to avoid her grimly brooding father and her steadily weeping mother, to avoid the very house itself. Plucking at her maid to follow, she turned out, past the fountain playing in the court, toward the pergola in the rose garden. From there she could stare at that fascinating holocaust below from which no one could take an eye and give herself up to that whirlpool muddle of bitter and bewildering reflections which seemed to constitute her entire mind tonight.

Harrington, concealed by a pillar of that same per-