The noise had wakened the other inhabitants of the _pension_, who came crowding into Sylvia's room; with the rest was Carrier and they managed to extract from her a vague account of what had happened. The aviator, in a rage, demanded an explanation of his conduct from the officer, who called him a _maquereau_. Carrier was strong; with help from the acrobats he had pushed the officer half-way through the window when Mère Gontran, who, notwithstanding her bedroom being two hundred yards away from the _pension_, had an uncanny faculty for divining when anything had gone wrong, appeared on the scene. Thirty-five years in Russia had made her very fearful of offending the military, and she implored Carrier and the acrobats to think what they were doing: in her red dressing-gown she looked like an insane cardinal. "They'll confiscate my property. They'll send me to Siberia. Treat his Excellency more gently, I beg. Sylvia, tell them to stop. Sylvia, he's going--he's going--he's gone!" He was gone indeed, head first into a clump of lilacs underneath the window, whither his tunic and sword followed him. The adventure with the drunken officer had exhausted the last forces of Sylvia; she lay back on the bed in a semi-trance, soothed by the unending bibble-babble all round. She was faintly aware of somebody's taking her hand and feeling her pulse, of somebody's saying that her eyes were like a dead woman's, of somebody's throwing a coverlet over her. Then the bibble-babble became much louder; there was a sound of crackling and a smell of smoke, and she heard shouts of "Fire!" "Fire!" "He has set fire to the outhouse!" There was a noise of splashing water, a rushing sound of water, a roar as of a thousand torrents in her head; the people in the room became animated surfaces, cardboard figures without substance and without reality; the devils began once more to sprout from the floor; she felt that she was dying, and in the throes of dissolution she struggled to explain that she must travel back to England, that she must not be buried in Russia. It seemed to her in a new access of semi-consciousness that Carrier and the two acrobats were kneeling by her bed and trying to comfort her, that they were patting her hands kindly and gently. She tried to warn them that they would blister themselves if they touched her, but her tongue seemed to have separated itself from her body. She tried to tell them that her tongue was already dead, and the effort to explain racked her whole body. Then, suddenly, dark and gigantic figures came marching into the room: they must be demons, and it was true about hell. She tried to scream her belief in immortality and to beg a merciful God to show mercy and save her from the Fiend. The somber forms drew near her bed. From an unimaginably distant past she saw framed in fire the picture of The Impenitent Sinner's Deathbed that used to hang in the kitchen at Lille;