‘Why, Bugles!’ began the Countess, rising in alarm; for that an ox should talk, as Livy tells us that a Roman representative of the bovine genus actually did, is scarcely more calculated to disturb the nerves than that a well-trained servant should crack the ice of his artificial decorum. The Earl, who was, like his wife, a partisan of old fashions, was lingering over his wine in the dining-room, and might of course be ill. Apoplexy was the first thought that rose, like a sheeted spectre, before the Countess’s mind. ‘Fire, my lady! Fire at High Tor; broke out sudden; and all the village is in flames!’ panted out Bugles the butler, who was fat and short of breath. And without were to be vaguely heard other voices and the sound of running feet, and the cry, alarming above all others, of ‘Fire! fire!’ as grooms and gardeners forgot their usual respectful reticence in the first flush of the anticipated struggle with the direst foe of man and his works. ‘There really is a fire, and I’m afraid a great one, to judge by the smoke and the sparks,’ said Lord Harrogate, who at this juncture entered. ‘My father has had his horse saddled already, and has started by this time for the village, and I am going too of course. I only came first to see if’—— ‘If we were ready to come too?’ cried Lady Maud. ‘To be sure we will, the moment we can get our hats, Gladys and I. Alice will stay with mamma. We can’t work at putting out the fire, but we may be of use somehow.’ And in an incredibly short space of time the Ladies De Vere and their brother were hurrying down the steep road that led to the scene of the disaster. High Tor House, isolated and on a lofty spot of rising ground, was in no sort of peril from the fire raging beneath; but the indwellers of the great mansion were not disposed, like the divinities of the Pagan Olympus, serenely to contemplate the woes of the inhabitants of earth, and without waiting for orders, nearly every boy and man in the Earl’s employ had hastened down to fight the common foe. ‘The dry weather—unusually dry for this moist district, where the last thing we generally have to complain of is the want of rain—must help the fire sadly,’ said Lord Harrogate, as the lodge-gates were left behind, and the lurid light of the conflagration became more and more distinctly visible through gaps in the high hedges that bordered the road. As they drew nearer, the eddying clouds of smoke, mingled with fiery dots here and there, the dull crimson glow, and the smothered sound of voices mingling with the roar of the flames and the clang of labour, gave unpleasant tokens of the mischief that was going on. ‘I hoped at the first that the report was an exaggerated one, as most reports are,’ said Lord Harrogate, as they came in sight of the burning houses. ‘But this is an ugly business. It is on one side of the street only, by good luck, that the fire is raging, and if we can keep it from spreading’——