It was the boy who spoke. He alone of them had his wits about him.
"Where is it?" I said.
The lad sprang forward to show me, but Mademoiselle was before him with the candle. She flew back into the passage, a passage of four or five feet only between that room and the second of the suite; in the wall of this she flung open a door, apparently of a closet. I looked in and saw the beginning of a staircase. My heart leapt at the sight.
"To the floor above?" I said.
"No, Monsieur, to the roof!"
"Up, up, then!" I cried in a frenzy of impatience. "It will give us time. Quick. They are coming."
For I heard the door at the end of the suite, the door I had locked, creak and yield. They were forcing it, at any moment it might give; where I stood waiting to bring up the rear, their hoarse cries and curses came to my ears. But the good door held; it held, long enough at any rate. Before it gave way we were on the stairs and I had shut the door of the closet behind me. Then, holding to the skirts of the woman before me, I groped my way up quickly--up and up through darkness with a close smell of bats in my nostrils--and almost before I could believe it, I stood with the panting, trembling group on the roof. The glare of the burning outhouses below shone on a great stack of chimneys beside us and reddened the sky above, and burnished the leaves of the chestnut trees that rose on a level with our eyes. But all the lower part of the steep roofs round us, and the lead gutters that ran between them, lay in darkness, the denser for the contrast. The flames crackled below, and a thick reek of smoke swept up past the coping, but the noise alike of fire and riot was deadened here. The night wind cooled our brows, and I had a minute in which to think, to breathe, to look round.
"Is there any other way to the roof?" I asked anxiously.
"One other, Monsieur!"
"Where? Or do you stay here, and guard this door," I said, pressing my gun on the man who had answered. "And let the boy come and show me. Mademoiselle, stay there if you please."