“That’s one of the things we’ll talk about to-morrow,” David said. But immediately he added quietly: “Tom saved us all. My instinct was to rush away from the flames. His, being a sailor, was to get through them. And if we had run away, I believe we would have been trapped. Hedda tells me the only stairway in the far wing, where I would have gone, has been locked for years. Tom got us back of the wind by crossing the upper hall, and we climbed over that strip of roof to the old sewing room, and broke the window, and after that it was easy, down the kitchen stairway.”
“The fire was coming—where?”
“Straight up that main stairway, as if it were a furnace!”
“And did we cross—near it?”
David hesitated, and Tom, on Gabrielle’s other side, said gruffly:
“Not very.”
Gabrielle shivered. And for a while they all watched the fire in silence.
“Luckily, John’s wife and little girl and Daisy and Sarah, went in to Crowchester yesterday,” David presently explained. “It seems that John saw it first; it started in the billiard-room wing. We think it may have been something the electricians did, or perhaps just rats and matches. John saw one of the windows all pink, from his room, but he thought probably some of us were down there, and actually went to bed. But after fifteen minutes or so he got up and looked out again——”
“My God, my heart turned to water!” John himself said, simply, as David paused. “The fire was bursting out of a dozen windows at once. She must have been burning since late afternoon, to get that start. I yelled for Frank, the Eyetalian, and Walker, and we all run to the house. Seemed to me we’d never rouse the girls!”
“We sleep,” Hedda said, gravely.