Higher still a zinc bath remained sticking against the charred, naked wall. The bathroom had fallen from it. The bath and its twisted pipes remained. And above all the blue sky peered down as into a pit's mouth. Janet looked fixedly at the iron supports, and measured them with her eye. Her colour did not change, nor her breath quicken. She felt her strength in her. Then, hugging the black wall till it crumbled against her, and shading her eyes till they could see only where to tread, she went swiftly up those awful stairs, and reached the sixth floor. Then her strength gave way, and she sank down upon something soft, and shuddered. A faint sound made her look back. One of the supports, loosened by her footstep, stirred, and then fell. It fell a long way. Even her marvellous inapprehensiveness was shaken. But her still courage returned to her, the quiet confidence that enabled her to break in nervous horses with which her recklessly foolhardy brother could do nothing. Janet rose slowly to her feet, catching them as she did so in something soft. Stamped into the charred grime of the concrete floor by the feet of the firemen were the remains of a sable cloak, which, as her foot touched it, showed a shred of rose-coloured lining. A step further her foot sank into a heap of black rags, evidently hastily flung down by one in headlong flight, through the folds of which gold embroidery and a pair of jewelled clasps gleamed faintly. Janet stood still a moment in what had been the heart of the fire. The blast of the furnace had roared down that once familiar passage, leaving a charred, rent hole, half filled up and silted out of all shape by ashes. Nevertheless her way lay down it. She crept stumbling along it with bent head. Surely the Brands' flat was exactly here, on the left, near the head of the staircase. But she could recognise nothing. She stopped short at a gaping cavity that had once been a doorway, and looked through it into what had once been a bedroom. The fire had swept all before it. If there had once been a floor and walls, and ceiling and furniture, all was gone, leaving a seared, egg-shaped hole. From its shelving sides three pieces of contorted iron had rolled into the central puddle--all that was left of the bed. Could _this_ be the Brands' flat? Janet passed on, and peered through the next doorway. Here the flames had not raged so fiercely. The blackened semblance of a room was still there, but shrunk like a mummy, and ready to crumble at a touch. It must have been a servant's bedroom. The chest of drawers, the bed, were still there in outline, but all ashes. On pegs on the wall hung ghosts of gowns and hats, as if drawn in soot. On the chest of drawers stood the effigy of a bedroom candlestick, with the extinguisher over it.