Aloud she hailed: "Oh! Help, help, _help!_" No answer. Even the echoes
flung back only dull, vacuous sounds that deepened her sense of awful
and incredible isolation.

What? No noise of human life anywhere to be heard? None! No familiar
hum of the metropolis now rose from what, when she had fallen asleep,
had been swarming streets and miles on miles of habitations.

Instead, a blank, unbroken leaden silence, that seemed part of the
musty, choking atmosphere--a silence that weighed down on Beatrice
like funeral-palls.

Dumfounded by all this, and by the universal crumbling of every
perishable thing, the girl ran, shuddering, back into the office.
There in the dust her foot struck something hard.

She stooped; she caught it up and stared at it.

"My glass ink-well! What? Only such things remain?"

No dream, then, but reality! She knew at length that some catastrophe,
incredibly vast, some disaster cosmic in the tragedy of its sweep, had
desolated the world.

"Oh, my mother!" cried she. "My mother--_dead?_ Dead, now, how long?"

She did not weep, but just stood cowering, a chill of anguished horror
racking her. All at once her teeth began to chatter, her body to shake
as with an ague.