But the woman didn't seem to know what to do. She kept on saying, 'Where's Honeysett? Oh, drat him! where's that Honeysett?'
So then Oswald felt it was the time to be a general, like he always meant to if he got the chance. He said, 'Come on!' and he took a stone and broke the kitchen window, and put his hand through the jagged hole and unfastened the catch, and climbed in. The back-door was locked and the key gone, but the front-door was only bolted inside. But it stuck very tight, from having been painted and shut before the paint was dry, and never opened again.
Oswald couldn't open it. He ran back to the kitchen window and shouted to the others.
'Go round to the other door and shove for all you're worth!' he cried in the manly tones that all must obey.
So they went; but Dicky told me afterwards that the woman didn't shove for anything like all she was worth. In fact, she wouldn't shove at all, till he had to make a sort of battering-ram of her, and then she seemed to awake from a dream, and they got the door open.
We followed the woman up the stairs and into a bedroom, and there was another woman sitting up in bed trembling, and her mouth opening and shutting.
'Oh, it's you, Eliza,' she said, falling back against the pillows. 'I thought it were tramps.'
Eliza did not break things to the sufferer gently, like we should have done, however hurried.
'Mercy you aren't burnt alive in your bed, Lily!' she merely remarked. 'The place is all ablaze!'
Then she rolled her sick sufferer in a blanket and took hold of her shoulders, and told us to take her feet.