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The window on the porch was smashed. Her father’s arm was reaching up to the catch, unlocking the window. He was crawling in. As the smoke encircled him he puffed like a man blowing out water after a dive.

Theo ran to him. “I didn’t want you here! I have the cloisonn—”

As calmly as though he were arguing a point at cards he mumbled, “Yes, yes, yes! Don’t bother me. You forgot the two big saras in the wall safe. ”

While the paint on the balusters in the hall bubbled and charred, and the heat was a pang in her lungs, he twirled the knob of the safe behind the big picture and drew out two cloisonn plates. Flames curled round the door jamb of the room like fingers closing on a stick.

“We’re shut off!” Theo cried.

“Yep. Better get out. Here. Drop that basket!”

Mr. Duke snatched the cloisonn from her, dropped it, hurled away his two plates, shoved her to the window he had opened, helped her out on the porch. He himself was still in the burning room. She gripped his arm when he tried to dart back. The cloisonn was already hidden from them by puffs of smoke.

Mr. Duke glanced back. He eluded her; pulled his arm free; disappeared in the smoke. He came back with a cheap china vase that for a thing so small was monumentally ugly. As he swung out of the window he said, “Your mother always thought a lot of that vase. ” Theo saw through eyes stinging with smoke that his hair had been scorched.

Fire engines were importantly unloading at the corner, firemen running up. A neighbor came to herd the Dukes into her house, and into more clothes.

Alone, from the room given to her by the neighbor, Theo watched her home burn. The flames were leering out of all the windows on the ground floor. Her father would never read the three-volume history that was too valuable for soldiers. Now the attic was glaring. Gone the elephant of a London traveling bag. Woolly smoke curled out of the kitchen windows as a fireman smashed them. Gone the fireless cooker that would not cook. She laughed. “It’s nicely cooked itself! Oh, I’m beastly. Poor Mother. All her beautiful marked linen—”

But she did not lose a sensation of running ungirdled, of breathing Maytime air.

Her father came in, dressed in the neighbor-host’s corduroy hunting coat, a pair of black dress trousers and red slippers. His hair was conscientiously combed, but his fingers still querulously examined the state of his unshaven chin.

She begged: “Daddy dear, it’s pretty bad, but don’t worry. We have plenty of money. We’ll make arrangements—”

He took her arms from about his neck, walked to the window. The broken skeleton of their home was tombed in darkness as the firemen controlled the flames. He looked at Theo in a puzzled way.

He said hesitatingly: “No, I won’t worry. I guess it’s all right. You see—I set the house afire. ”

She was silent, but her trembling fingers sought her lips as he went on: “Shoveled hot coals from the furnace into kindling bin in the basement. Huh! Yes. Used to be good furnace tender when I was a real man. Peace bells had woke me up. Wanted to be free. Hate destruction, but—no other way. Your mother wouldn’t let me sell the house. I was going mad, sticking there, waiting—waiting for death. Now your mother will be willing to come. Get a farm. Travel. And I been watching you. You couldn’t have had Stacy Lindstrom, long as that house bossed us. You almost caught me, in the hall, coming back from the basement. It was kind of hard, with house afire, to lie there in bed, quiet, so’s your mother wouldn’t ever know—waiting for you to come wake us up. You almost didn’t, in time. Would have had to confess. Uh, let’s go comfort your mother. She’s crying. ”