DERWENT APPEARED AT THE WINDOW BEARING DE COURCY IN HIS ARMS."
Suddenly Derwent appeared at the window. He was bearing De Courcy in his arms. The flames rioted round him, and they could see that his clothes were all charred.
"The staircase is a sheet of flame," he cried. "He was on his bed. The flames have not reached him."
As he spoke the ladder snapped in the middle and fell, and Daphne screamed, shutting out the scene with her hands, and then as suddenly snatching them away.
Derwent, framed in the window and holding Jack in his arms, cursed at it. For a moment he seemed nonplussed. Then he shouted—
"Blakiston, stand in as near as possible. I'm going to throw him out. You can break his fall. It is only the drop of a few feet. Stand on that bed, it will be softer."
The old man rushed to the spot. The flower bed seemed a good way from the house, but the flames reached it in the eddies of the wind. Daphne, realising what was meant, also went and stood on the bed. She looked at the twelve feet or more between it and the house, and wondered, yet never for a moment doubted that Derwent could do what he purposed.
They breathlessly watched him brace his muscles. In the glow of the light he looked grand, as a hero might, strengthening himself for his last fight. Then, with a cry of warning, he threw the man out, and the two waiting broke his fall. They, intent upon the rescued man, bore him from the reach of the flames, forgetting for a moment the man who had risked so much. When they looked he was gone.
The recoil had thrown him back, and the floor, rotten with the heating of the fire, had broken away. They knew afterwards that he must have been aware of the result, and that, knowing, he had given his life for the other. For it would have been an easy thing for him to have jumped himself had he been willing to sacrifice De Courcy.