The Ground Floor Front, a thin, spry old gentleman, hovered about us, bobbing in and out like the little man in the weather-house. He was in the insurance business, I was immediately informed, and it seemed a comfort to us all to know it, though I cannot for the life of me imagine why it should have been to me, not one stick or stitch up there in our chambers being insured. The Ground Floor Back was at his club, and his wife and two children had not been disturbed, as in their chambers the risk was not immediate, and, anyway, they could easily walk out should it become so. He had been promptly sent for, and when a message came back that he was playing whist and would hurry to the rescue of his family as soon as his rubber was finished, the indignation in the Housekeeper's room was intense. "Brute!" the Housekeeper said, and after that, through the rest of the night, she would ask every few minutes if he had returned, and the answer in the negative was fresh fuel to her wrath. She was, if anything, more severe with the young man whose chambers were blazing, and who confessed he had gone out toward midnight leaving a burning candle in one of his rooms. He treated the fire as a jest, which she could not forgive; and when at dawn, he decided that all his possessions, including account-books committed to his care, were in ashes, and that it was useless to wait, and he wished us good-morning and good-by, she hinted darkly that fires might be one way of disposing of records it was convenient to be rid of. Indignation served better than salts to rouse the Housekeeper from her hysterics, and I was glad of the distraction it gave her for another reason: without it, she could not long have remained unconscious of an evil that I look back to as the deadliest of all during that night's vigil. For, gradually through her room, by this time close to suffocation, there crept the most terrible smell. It took hold of me, choked me, sickened me. The Housekeeper's daughter and the First Floor Back blanched under it, the Housekeeper turned from white to green. I have often marvelled since that they never referred to it, but I know why I did not. For it was I who sent that smell downstairs when I threw the Russian _schube_ into the arms of the Third Floor Front's servant. Odours, they say, are the best jogs to memory, and the smell of the _schube_ is for me so inextricably associated with the fire, that I can never think of one without remembering the other.