Two of the group--Dr.Peake and Mrs.Crawford, Mrs.Grant's mother--had been of the audience when the Richmond theatre burned down, thirty-six years before, and they talked over the frightful details of that memorable tragedy.

These were eye-witnesses, and with their eyes I saw it all with an intolerable vividness: I saw the black smoke rolling and tumbling toward the sky, I saw the flames burst through it and turn red, I heard the shrieks of the despairing, I glimpsed their faces at the windows, caught fitfully through the veiling smoke, I saw them jump to their death, or to mutilation worse than death.

The picture is before me yet, and can never fade.
In due course they talked of the colonial mansion of the Peakes, with its stately columns and its spacious grounds, and by odds and ends I picked up a clearly defined idea of the place.

I was strongly interested, for I had not before heard of such palatial things from the lips of people who had seen them with their own eyes.

One detail, casually dropped, hit my imagination hard.