Now, this was a bad prophecy; but the fulfilment came more swiftly and more surely than any of us had looked for. Indeed, Dolly Venn was scarce upon his feet, and the sleep hardly out of Seth Barker's eyes, when the room in which we stood was all filled by a scathing flame of crimson light, and, a whirlwind of fire sweeping about us, it seemed to wither and burn everything in its path and to scorch our very limbs as it passed them by. To this there succeeded an overpowering stench of sulphur, and ripping sounds as of wood bursting in splinters, and beams falling, and the crackling of timber burning. Not a man among us, I make sure, but knew full well the meaning of those signals or what they called him to do. The bungalow was struck; life lay in the fog without, in the death-fog we had twice escaped. "She's burning--she's burning, by----!" cried Seth Barker, running wildly for the door; and to his voice was added that of Duncan Gray, who roared: "My lead, my lead--stand back, for your lives!" He threw a muffler round his neck and ran out from the stricken bungalow. The whole westward wing of the house was now alight. Great clouds of crimson flame wrestled with the looming fog above us; they illumined all the garden about as with the light of ten thousand fiery lamps. Suffocating smoke, burning breezes, floating sparks, leaping tongues of flame drove us on. Cries you heard, one naming the heights for a haven, another clamouring for the beach, one answering with an oath, another, it may be, with a prayer; but no man keeping his wits or shaping a true course. What would have happened but for the holding fog and the sulphurous air we breathed, I make no pretence to say; but Nature stopped us at last, and, panting and exhausted, we came to a halt in the woods, and asked each other in the name of reason what we should do next. "The sea!" cries Peter Bligh, forgetting his courage (a rare thing for him to do); "show me the sea or I'm a dead man!" To whom Seth Barker answers: "If there's breath, it's on the hills; we'll surely die here." And little Dolly, he said: "I cannot run another step, sir; I'm beat--dead beat!" For my part I had no word for them; it remained for Doctor Gray to lead again. "I will show you the road," cried he, "if you will take it." "And why not?" I asked him. "Why not, doctor?" "Because," he answered, very slowly, "it's the road to Edmond Czerny's house." CHAPTER XIV A WHITE POOL--AND AFTERWARDS