'The portico and the walls are standing,' pursued Lady Palliser; 'and no doubt a clever architect will be able to build the house up again in the old style.'
'But, mamma, it was an ugly, uninteresting house—not a hundred years old.'
'Exactly so. If it had been really an old house, one would be glad to get rid of it; but it was all as good as new, and so thoroughly substantial! and how you can call it ugly, with such a portico, I can't imagine. I wonder you have not more classical taste. I love anything Grecian. The only thing I ever felt proud of at Les Fontaines was the plaster urns with scarlet geraniums in them!'
'Mamma, how was I saved? Who was it saved me?' asked Ida, presently, when she had taken her cup of tea, and the Swiss clock over the chimney-piece had struck nine.
The sun was shining through the open lattice and upon the roses and the lilies in the little lodge garden. Everything wore a glad and cheerful aspect in the summer morning.
'Ah, my dear, that is a story!' exclaimed Lady Palliser, nodding her head with intense significance, and pleased at being able to divert Ida's thoughts from her husband's miserable end; 'I never did! You will be surprised! Oh, my dear, I thought it was all over with you! All the gardeners and stablemen were there—and Rogers—and John and William—and Henry—half dressed and in slippers, poor creatures; and I begged and implored of them to save you—to get to your room somehow—inside or out. But the staircase to the second floor was choked with smoke and flame, and falling timbers; one of the men tried to go up, but he came back and said he must wait for the firemen—nobody but a fireman could do it. And then they got ladders, but the first ladder wasn't long enough, and nobody seemed to be in their proper senses. Thomas rode off to Petersfield for the engine directly the fire broke out, but that's eight miles off, as you know, and it all seemed hopeless. I was running about among them all like a mad woman, in my dressing-gown and slippers; and as for Jane Dyson, she sat on the lowest step of the portico, and went out of one fit of hysterics into another, just as she did when the Archbishop's wife died; and I thought all hope was over, when a man rushed in among us, snatched the longest ladder from the men who were bringing it from the walled garden, and put it up against the balcony. He went up it just like a sailor, and before I could hardly breathe he was coming down again with you in his arms, safe and sound. And who do you think the man was?'
'The fire-brigade man, I suppose.'
'Not a bit of it. The man who saved you was Vernie's friend, Cheap Jack.'