‘The Castle is on fire,’ she remarked at last, after a heavy pause. Suddenly she felt elated by her sagacity. ‘The Castle is on fire,’ she repeated slowly.
‘I think we had better get out of this,’ said Kingston. ‘It’s that woman’s confounded candles upstairs. Ring the bell, Gundred, will you?’
He went to the door, and opened it. The passage, their one hope of reaching the body of the Castle, was an impassable mass of flame at its further end. Kingston came back into the room. Even now the full horror of the situation had not struck him.
‘I’m afraid we can’t escape that way,’ he said quietly. ‘The corridor is ablaze.’
Gundred, meanwhile, was vigorously pulling at the bell; in the silence that followed Kingston’s announcement she continued methodically at her task, and the knob could be heard slapping again and again into its socket as she released it.
Kingston glanced from Gundred to Isabel.
Isabel had said nothing hitherto. He waited poignantly to hear what she would suggest.
At last she spoke. Her voice was strained with agony and terror.
‘And I—I cannot move,’ she said. ‘I am tied by the leg.’
Kingston turned furiously upon Gundred, who, in an access of vain frenzy, was rending and tearing the bell.