"See, Monsieur Gaspard," said he, as we stood beneath the lintel, and the sullen heat, acrid with the smell of smouldering wood, puffed and eddied into our faces. He was frankly weeping now, but, as I believe, unconsciously, his tears half grief, half rage at his helplessness. "See with what a system and to what an end these devils went to work. Not to burn Solignac, but to gut it beyond use was their object. Good and well if it burned, but to destroy was the chief thought. What have you done to Jan Meert that he should do this thing to Solignac? If there was a debt it's paid and the reckoning is due on our side now. They must have fired the house at a score of places; a score? two, three score, but not to burn. Look how it is always the same; the ends of the beams have gone, and then, pouf! down came the floor, down came the middle walls, down came the roof, beam upon beam, rafter on rafter, tearing the plaster and the copings with them till the very weight of all choked the fire to a smoulder and a smoke. But what mattered that! There is nothing left of Solignac but sheer walls, with here and there a splintered spear of wood thrust out for the bats to swing from, and that's what they worked for." "In three hours?" said I helplessly; "three hours or four; how could that be?" "What Jan Meert does not know at such work no man knows. A smear of fiery stuff here, a smear there, a touch under this beam, a touch under that; the furnishings piled to the middle of the floor for weight, the wood dry with the the dryness of three hundred years--but what does it matter how he did it; there it is." Yes, there it was, and neither guesswork nor cry of the heart could make the disaster less complete, or lighten the weight of the blow. Three hundred years of tradition, three hundred years of life and death, man's honour and woman's pureness, mother's love and child's reverence, all ended, as it were, in a breath, ended by a brutal rogue's undeserved, unnatural, and unprofitable violence. Such an end to such a place was as horrible as a wolf's rending out the life of an innocent babe.