“Now mount, every man, and let us begone,” said the count triumphantly. “By the bones of John the Baptist! we have made an example of this Icingla, and done enough to deter others from setting themselves against our good Lord Louis. Ride on;” and as the count spoke he turned his horse’s head, and, followed by his band of ruffians, rode leisurely by the twilight, up the glade by which he had come on his errand of devastation. Nor had the French in any degree failed in the work which they came to do. When Wolf, seeing that the coast was clear, emerged from his hiding-place, and came into the open space to gaze on the burning house, night had already fallen, and the sight was terrible to behold, and all the more so to him that he feared the inmates had fallen victims. The fire, indeed, was raging, and devouring its prey like a fiend, and coiling, as the serpent does, round its victim. In some places it had reached the roof, and was leaping towards the sky, on which the reflection of the flames was red as blood, and there was every prospect of the flames meeting in such a way as to reduce the old house to a heap of ashes and ruins. Driven by the wind, the fire reached the outbuildings, and stables, barns, brewhouse, and cow-houses, and pigeon-houses were involved in one general conflagration. Only the little chapel dedicated to St. Dunstan, from the fact of its standing apart from the other buildings, and in the quarter opposite to that towards which the wind was blowing, had a chance of escape. At this stage, and while all but one wing of the house was enveloped in flame and smoke, Styr the Anglo-Saxon, having accidentally learned that some catastrophe had occurred, joined his son in the darkness, and he did not come a moment too soon. Scarcely had Wolf, in hurried accents, explained what had happened, when shouts and screams of agony reached their ears, and, listening to ascertain the direction from which the cries came, they, by the lurid light which the fire threw around, descried, at the casement of an upper chamber in the wing still unscathed, faces of men and women in mortal terror of the most terrible of deaths. Styr guessed all: the inhabitants of Oakmede had fled to the hiding-hole to escape the hands of the foreign soldiery, and, ignorant that the house was on fire, had remained in concealment till the flames had seized the stairs, and their means of escape had been cut off. Their position was now truly awful; and the old man shuddered at the sight.