He sprang into the basement, ran through laundry and kitchen. The cellar door swung wide open above the stairs which ran down into darkness; and as he halted to listen Clarence dashed up out of the depths, scuttled around the stairs and fled upward into the silent regions above. "Betty!" he cried, forgetting in his alarm the lesser conventions, "where are you?" "Oh, dear--oh, dear!" she wailed. "I am in such a dreadful plight. Could you help me, please?" "Are you hurt?" he asked. Fright made his voice almost inaudible. He struck a match with shaking fingers and ran down the cellar stairs. "Betty! Where are you?" "Oh, I am here--in the coal." "What?" "I--I can't seem to get out; I stepped into the coal pit in the dark and it all--all slid with me and over me and I'm in it up to the shoulders." Another match flamed; he saw a stump of a candle, seized it, lighted it, and, holding it aloft, gazed down upon the most heart rending spectacle he had ever witnessed. The next instant he grasped a shovel and leaped to the rescue. She was quite calm about it; the situation was too awful, the future too hopeless for mere tears. What had happened contained all the dignified elements of a catastrophe. They both realized it, and when, madly shoveling, he at last succeeded in releasing her she leaned her full weight on his own, breathing rapidly, and suffered him to support and guide her through the flame-shot darkness to the culinary regions above. Here she sank down on a chair for one moment in utter collapse. Then she looked up, resolutely steadying her voice: "Could anything on earth more awful have happened to a girl?" she asked, lips quivering in spite of her. She stretched out what had once been a pair of white gloves, she looked down at what had been a delicate summer gown of white. "How," she asked with terrible calmness, "am I to get to Oyster Bay?" He dropped on to a kitchen chair opposite her, clasping his coal-stained hands between his knees, utterly incapable of speech. She looked at her shoes--once snowy white; with a shudder she stripped the soiled gloves from elbow to wrist and flung them aside. Her arms and hands formed a starling contrast to the remainder of the ensemble. "What," she asked, "am I to do?" "The thing to do," he said, "is to telephone to your family at Oyster Bay." "The telephone has been disconnected. So has the water--we can't even w-wash our hands!" she faltered. He said: "I can go out and telephone to your family to send a maid with some clothes for you--if you don't mind being left alone in an empty house for a little while." "No, I don't; but," she gazed uncertainly at the black opening of the cellar, "but, please, don't be gone very long, will you?" He promised fervidly. She gave him the number and her family's name, and he left by the basement door.