placed Mary in safety, Mr Summerhayes himself hurried to the same spot. It was he alone who mounted the ladder, though everybody else said it was madness. But it would have been as sane a proceeding to walk into a furnace as into that room, which was the very centre of the fire. He came down again deadly pale, and almost fainting, with a hurt on his head from a falling beam, and half suffocated with the fiery smoke. The tin box was beyond the possibility of redemption. But the fire, curiously enough, scarcely penetrated beyond the west wing, which was an unimportant part of the house—a recent addition, where nobody slept, and which, indeed, contained little that was important except Mr Summerhayes’s study, which had been built after his own design, and contained all his pet and personal belongings. Mary and the children watched from the gardener’s cottage the working of the fire-engines; and in the excitement of seeing how the fire was got under, and how little damage, after all, was done to Fontanel, forgot the misery of the morning and their comfortless circumstances. Even Loo felt that her stepfather was to be regarded as a hero, when he came, pale, black, and begrimed—after it became apparent that the work of destruction was stopped—to the cottage to have his head bound up, and to see that his wife and her children were safe. And perhaps Loo was still better disposed towards him when she found that he did not take upon himself any heroic airs, but was in a most savage temper, cursing old Gateshead as nobody had ever before heard Mr Summerhayes curse any man. “I was rash not to see him safe to bed,” cried the master of the burning house; and Mary did all she could, in her generous way, to deprecate and excuse “the poor old man.” “Nobody is to blame; it must have been an accident—only an accident,” said Mary; and Mr Summerhayes, in his rage and vexation, had not even the grace to be civil to her, but still muttered curses upon old Gateshead. While, for his part, Mr Gateshead went round and round what had been the west wing, wringing his hands. “Burned!—lost!—my tin box. I will never dare look Courtenay in the face again; and, good Lord! what’s to become of the children?” cried the poor old lawyer. He could not help hearing some of Mr Summerhayes’s passionate exclamations, and perceived, by the way everybody hustled past him, that he was blamed for the sudden calamity. Though he was an old fogy, he was as sensitive as any man to a personal grievance. Very soon he began to think about this mysterious business. “Good Lord, the deed! the poor dear children!” said the old lawyer to himself. He, too, grew angry and pale with indignation; but he kept silence and his own counsel. This was the strange and ill-omened event which happened at Fontanel the day before Charley’s coming of age. CHAPTER IX.—THE FIRE AND ITS CONSEQUENCES.