The fire had broken out on the seventh floor of the great block of buildings, and had raged slowly downwards to the sixth and fifth. But at first, as Janet mounted the sodden staircase, there was hardly any trace of the devastation save in the wet, streaked walls, and the constant dropping of water from above. But the fourth floor bore witness. The ceilings were scored with great cracks. The plaster had fallen in places, and everything--walls, ceilings, doors, and passages--was blackened as if licked by great tongues of smoke. The young couple were standing at the further end of a long empty passage, trying to open a door. As Janet looked, she saw the man put his shoulder to it. Then she turned once more to the next flight of the staircase. It was strewn with wreckage. The bent iron banisters, from which the lead hung in congealed drops, supported awkwardly the contorted remains of the banisters from above, which had crashed down upon them. The staircase had ceased to be a staircase. It was a steep, sliding mass of fallen _débris_, down which the demon of fire had hurled, as into a well, the ghastly entrails of the havoc of his torture chambers above. Janet looked carefully at the remnants of the staircase. The heat had reached it, but not the fire. She climbed half way up it, securing a foothold where she could among the _débris_. But, halfway, the banisters from above blocked her passage, tilted crazily towards her, insurmountable. She dared not touch them for fear of bringing them, and an avalanche of piled rubbish behind them, down upon her. She turned back a few steps, deliberately climbed, in her short country skirt, over the still standing banisters, and, holding firmly by them, went up the remainder of the flight, cautious step by step, as she and Fred had done as children, finding a foothold where she could, and not allowing her eyes to look down into the well below her. At the next landing she climbed over the banisters again, felt them for a sickening moment give under her weight, and stopped to take breath and look round her. She was on the fifth floor. Even here the fire had not actually been, but the heaps of sodden ashes, the gaping, burst panels, the seared doors, the blackness of the disfigured passages, the long, distraught wires of the electric lighting, showed that heat had been here; blinding, scorching, blistering heat. The Brands' flat was on the sixth floor. Janet looked up once more, and even her steady eyes were momentarily daunted. The staircase was gone. A raging fire had swept up its two last flights as up a chimney, and had carried all before it. What the fire had refused it had flung down, choking up the landing below. Nothing remained of the staircase save the iron supports, sticking out of the wall like irregular, jagged teeth, and marking where each step of the stairs had been.