The woman gave a scared look up and down. The flames at that moment wrapped round the window, and, with a wild howl, the crowd saw her disappear into the room.
Jeffreys all this time had been standing wedged in the crowd, a spectator of that hideous scene, and now a witness of this last tragedy.
With a desperate effort he fought his way to the front, hitting right and left to make himself a passage. It was a minute before he got through. Then the crowd, realising as if by intuition his purpose, staggered back, and raised a howl as he dashed into the door of the half-consumed building.
The first flight of steps was still intact, and he was up it in a moment; but as he dashed up the second the smoke whirled down in his face and half-choked him. He groped—for it was impossible to see—in search of the door; and guided partly by the roar of the crowd without, and partly by the shrieks within, he found the room.
It was full of flame as he entered it, and to all appearance contained nothing else. The wretched woman, finding the stairs worse to face than the window, had rushed back there and flung herself desperately onto the heads of the crowd below. As he turned to save himself, Jeffreys, amid the roar of the flames, caught the sound of a shout from the corner of the room which he had imagined to be empty.
Rushing towards it, he caught sight of a figure of a lad on the floor, blackened with smoke, and evidently unable to move.
Yet he was not senseless, for he called, “I can’t walk—help me.”
Jeffreys caught him in his arms in a moment, and only just in time. He had literally to wade through flame to the door; and when he reached the stairs outside, the dense smoke, reddening every instant, burst upon him well-nigh overwhelmingly.
How he struggled down that awful flight with his burden he knew not. More than once he stumbled; and once a shower of fallen embers all but stunned him. It was all done in a minute.