In her despair she prayed—holding on by the window-sill as if she were going to be torn from it, she framed some sort of petition to God to help her. Wearied and exhausted, frightened, and with that awful, vague, nameless dread at length taking a tangible form, it seemed to her as though, for a moment, everything faded from her eyes—as though, even while her lips were moving and her heart uttering some terrified words of supplication, her senses left her for a moment—the yard swam round, the buildings went up and down before her sight, the sunlight turned to darkness, and then—— Then, as if, after having been swung out into space for an immeasurable distance, she came back to the same point again—and the mist melted away, and the light was clear once more; and with a keen vision, though still with a giddy and confused feeling in her head, Heather beheld Arthur coming out of the carpenter’s shop, dragging a bag of shavings after him, which he shot out into one of the lower floors of the silk factory. Still she watched him. He piled shavings, sackful after sackful, among the bales of raw silk—he carried the old wrapperings and more shavings into the counting-house—she saw him bring jars of oil and turpentine and empty them on the heap he had already collected. “He has gone mad,” she decided, rising up; “he has gone mad, and he is going to set the place on fire; and we cannot get out, and there is no help to be had.” None, for they were locked in. She dared not go downstairs and beat at the gates, for she felt more afraid now of encountering Arthur than even of remaining where she was. Oh! those cruel walls, those dead, eyeless, earless walls, to which she might scream herself hoarse in vain—this solitude in the midst of numbers—this helplessness, with help within a few feet of her—this prison without a gaoler—this cage in which they were both about to be burned to death. Well enough she knew that if once the factory caught fire, no living creature could long breathe within that confined space. It would be like trying to exist in a brick oven with a furnace alight at the one end. Already she seemed to feel the hot tongues of flame licking her cheek—already the struggle for life, dear life, appeared to have begun—already the scorching heat was drying up her blood—already she was beating against the closed gates, beating with her clenched hands till they were bruised and bleeding, while the fire raged behind, and the air became hotter and hotter, the flames fiercer and fiercer. Already the horror she had often felt of fire in that enclosed place seemed to have become a tangible reality; and, with a low cry, Heather rushed from the room, and down the staircase.