"Then why should you laugh over a poor wretch who is struggling with worse flames and in danger of being dragged down to more terrible fires of endless punishment?" "Fire! Fire!" cried some one in the hall. For a moment Flint took this to be like the "No, no" of a moment before,--only a running comment on the speaker's words,--but at the same instant his eye caught the curling of a thin blue line of smoke in the corner, and he remembered the furniture and flimsy flummery stored on the lower floor. He measured the distance to the door. There was no one between him and it. He would have little difficulty in escaping if he started on the instant--_but these others!_ "The place will go up like a rocket," he said to Brady, "but a panic is worse. Hold the door with me!" "Take me, meester; I'm stronger nor him!" said a broad-shouldered coal-heaver, who had overheard their whisper. With this the three men made a bolt for the door, and formed in line in front of it, with their stout walking-sticks in hand. "Keep your seats. We will knock down the first man who moves. There's no danger!" Flint shouted. For an instant the crowd wavered. It would have taken only one more impulse to turn it into a mob. Nora Costello saw the danger, and seizing her tambourine she began on a ringing Army chorus. The audience fell in with such energy that it drowned the rattle of the fire engines. "Don't be alarmed," said a fireman, sticking his head in at the door, "the fire is out, and the danger over. Five minutes more, though," he added in an undertone to Flint, "would have done the business, and then, I reckon, we might have spent a week looking for bodies in the ashes." "Come, Brady, let us go; I want some fresh air," said Flint, when the excitement had subsided and another convert had begun his sing-song confession and adjuration. "Go, then," answered his friend; "I shall wait to the end. I am going to walk home with Miss Costello. Yes," he went on, in response to his friend's questioning glance, "it's to-night or never." "Then I won't wait," said Flint; "only come in to-morrow and tell me how you fared." It was with a feeling of exultation that Flint found himself again on the street. "How grewsome it would have been," he thought, "to be carried off in a job lot like that! I can imagine nothing worse, except perhaps to be killed in a crush at a bargain-counter." CHAPTER XX THE UNFORESEEN "C'est toujours l'imprevu qui arrive." The ruling thought in Flint's mind as he emerged from the crowded room and made his way down the shaky stairs to the outer door, was of the physical delight of inhaling fresh air. He drew in two or three deep, lung-filling breaths, then he opened his coat and shook it to the air as he had seen doctors do after coming out of a sick-room.