The most likely story, and the one to which Blaise inclined to give most credence, was that the child of a woman who worked daily at the castle, escaping from its mother’s care and launched on an independent voyage of discovery through the rooms, had knocked over a burning lamp. Then, terrified at the immediate consequences--the sudden flaring of some ancient tapestry, dry as tinder with the summer heat, near which the lamp had fallen--he had bolted away, out of the castle and so home, too scared to tell anyone of the accident. But, as Jean commented mournfully, what did it matter how it happened? Except from the prosaic viewpoint of the fire insurance company, who would probably desire to know: all kinds of details that it was impossible to supply! For her, nothing mattered except that Beirnfels, her home from childhood and the place where she and Blaise had proposed to spend a great part of their married life, was a furnace of flames. It was a splendid but very terrible sight The great, grim walls of the castle stood four-square against the sky, charred and blackened but defiantly impervious to the flames that were licking covetously against the solid stone which fashioned them. Sentinel to the very end, they reared themselves unvanquished, guardians still, though all that they had sheltered through their centuries of watch and ward lay consumed within their very heart. Jean, standing beside Blaise and watching the upward tossing flames and the crimson banner of the lowering heavens, spoke suddenly: “‘And the sky as red as blood above it.’ Blaise, the last of Keturah Stanley’s prophecies has come true!” An hour later help was forthcoming from the distant town to which a messenger had been despatched post haste as soon as it was realised that the household staff, even with assistance from the village, was hopelessly inadequate to cope with a fire of such magnitude. But it was already too late to accomplish very much in the way of salvage. All that remained possible was to quench that inferno of fire as soon as might be and so, perhaps, save some of the outbuildings. Hour after hour through the night, human endeavour fought with the flames--subduing them again and again only to find them kindling into fresh life at the gusty bidding of the wind, leaping redly from the lambent heart of the conflagration, which glowed and pulsed and heaved like some living monster intent upon destruction. It was not until dawn was breaking that, with the dying down of the wind, the flickering crimson light faded finally from the sky; and half an hour later, when the fire had been at last extinguished, the village folk, gathered about the scene of the catastrophe, had dispersed to their homes.