"I fancy it started in the laundry drying-room," their host observed. "Overheated pipes or something."
"How about crossed wires?" some one asked. "The electricity in the east wing was out of commission from the start."
"But the flames showed first in the north extension," another man contributed. "I was lying wide-awake and saw the glare from my window."
"Yes. And if it hadn't been for your wakefulness, old chap, we might every one of us have been incinerated in our beds," Archdeacon observed gratefully. "As it was, the east wing was totally cut off before we could get to it."
He turned to Carleigh. "That's where you were, you know. We did our best to reach your room, but you were hemmed in. We tried shying stones at your windows, but it was too pitchy dark to locate them. Fancy what I went through before you dropped onto the dahlia bed!"
Sir Caryll appeared far less grateful for his deliverance than was to have been expected. He wasn't sure, indeed, that he was grateful at all. What with one romance ended and another budding one interrupted by death or disfigurement—life for him certainly was not worth the living.
"I suppose I did have a narrow squeak for it," he said.
Dawn had come, but it was a dark, indistinguishable dawn because of the heavy black clouds that shrouded it. The hall at Cross Saddle was brilliantly alight therefore when they arrived, and on the wide hearth blazed a roaring fire of great logs.
Many of the earlier arrivals had already been provided for, but there was still a waiting group, so smoke-stained and in such motley makeshift attire as to have titillated the risibilities of any but the most stolid British.
Sir Caryll's visage, black as a Senegambian's, was as long as the proverbial arm of coincidence. Directly he began making inquiry for the doctors in attendance on Nina, and learned with a mingling of encouragement and dismay that they had already done what they could and departed.