So down the steps and into the turmoil of the seething Square, walled on two sides by fire, and full of a drunken, frenzied rabble—for all decent onlookers had fled, awake at last to the result of their quiescence—the strange procession moved, the girl going first. Tipsy groups, singing and dancing delirious jigs to the music of falling walls, pillagers hurrying in ruthless haste from house to house, or quarrelling over their spoils, householders striving to save a remnant of their goods from dwellings past saving—all made way for it. Men who swayed on their feet, brandishing their arms and shouting obscene songs, being touched on the shoulder by others, stared, and gave place with mouths agape. Even boys, whom the madness of that night made worse than men, and unsexed women, shrank at sight of it, and were silent—nay, followed with a strange homage the slender white figure, the shining eyes, the pure sweet face. In the worst horrors of the French Revolution it is said that the devotion of a daughter stayed the hands which were raised to slay her father. Even so, on this night in Bristol, amid surroundings less bloody, but almost as appalling, the wildest and the most furious made way for the daughter and the mother. Led by instinct rather than by calculation, Mary did not pause, or look aside, but moved onward, until she reached the middle of the Square; until some sixty or seventy yards divided her charge from the nearest of the burning houses. The heat was less scorching here, the crowd less compact. A fixed seat afforded shelter on one side, and by it she signed to the bearers to set the couch down. The statue stood not far away on the other side, and secured them against the ugly rushes which were caused from time to time by the fall of a roof or a rain of sparks. Mary gazed round her in stupor. And no wonder. The whole of the north side of the great Square, and a half of the west side—thirty lofty houses in all—were in flames, or were sinking in red-hot ruin. The long wall of fire, the canopy of glowing smoke, the ceaseless roar of the element, the random movements of the forms which, pigmy-like, played between her and the conflagration, the doom which threatened the whole city, held her awestruck, spellbound, fascinated. But even the feelings which she experienced, confronted by that sight, were exceeded by the emotions of one who had seen her advance, and, at first with horror, then as he recognised her, with incredulity, had watched the white figure which threaded its way through this rout of satyrs, this orgy of recklessness. She had not succeeded in wresting her eyes from the spectacle before a trembling hand fell on her arm, and the last voice she expected to hear called her by name. “Mary!” Sir Robert cried. “Mary! My God! What are you doing here?” For, taken up with staring at her, he had seen neither who accompanied her nor what they bore.