That was the warning that went with them upstairs, and it nerved them for the task before them. Over that task it were well to draw a veil. The poor sick woman, roused anew and abruptly to a sense of her surroundings, to the flickering lights, the smell of smoke, the strange faces, to all the horrors of that scene rarely equalled in our modern England, shrieked aloud. The courage, which had before upheld her, deserted her. She refused to be moved, refused to believe that they were there to save her; she failed even to recognise her daughter, she resisted their efforts, and whatever Mary could say or do, she added to the peril of the moment all the misery which frantic terror and unavailing shrieks could add. They did not know, while they reasoned with her, and tried to lift her, and strove to cloak her against the outer air, the minute at which the house might be entered; nor even that it was not already entered, already in some part on fire. The girl, though her hands were steady, though she never wavered, though she persisted, was white as paper. And even Miss Sibson was almost unnerved, when at last nature came to their aid, and with a frantic protest, a last attempt to thrust them from her, the poor woman swooned; and the men who had looked on, as unhappy as those engaged, lifted the couch and bore her down the stairs. Odd are the windings of chance and fate. These men, in whom every good instinct was awakened by the sight before them, might, had the schoolmistress’s eye alighted on others, have plundered on with their fellows; and with the more luckless of those fellows have stood on the scaffold a month later! Still, time had been lost. And perforce the men descended slowly, so that as they reached the hall the door gave way, and admitted a dozen rascals, who tumbled over one another in their greed. The moment was critical, the inrush of horrid sounds and sights appalling. But Mary rose to the occasion. With a courage which from this time remained with her to the end, she put herself forward. “Will you let us pass out?” she said. “My mother is ill. You do not wish to harm her?” Now Lady Sybil had made Mary put off the Quaker-like costume in which she had wished to nurse her, and she had had no time to cover the light muslin dress she wore. The men saw before them a beautiful creature, white-robed, bareheaded, barenecked—even the schoolmistress had not snatched up so much as a cloak—a Una with sweet shining eyes, before whom they fell aside abashed. “Lord love you, Miss!” one cried heartily. “Take her out! And God bless you!” while the others grinned fatuously.