Of the next few minutes, which seemed an eternity of terror, I can recall nothing now except a struggle for air. I must have fought my way through the smoke upstairs. I must have passed that savage light so close that it scorched my face, which was blistered afterward, though I felt no pain at the moment. I must have heard that rush of flames so near that it deafened me; but of this I can remember nothing to-day. Yet I can still feel the air blowing in my face on the lawn outside. I can still see the little green leaves on the cedars standing out illuminated in that terrible glow. I can still hear the cry that rang out: “Pell! Where is Pell? Didn’t you bring Pell with you?” Fifteen years ago. Fire and ashes, pain and happiness, have passed and are forgotten; but that question, as I heard it then, still sounds in my ears. “Where is Pell? Didn’t you bring Pell with you?” “I thought he was safe,” my voice was so thick that the words were scarcely articulate. “His room was empty.” “He isn’t with the other children. We thought he had gone to you.” The speaker I have forgotten—Cousin Pelham or his wife, or the nurse, it is no matter—but the words are still living. “I will go back.” This was Cousin Pelham, I knew, for he had turned to enter the burning house. “It is too late now.” This was not one, but several voices together. As they spoke the windows of the house shone like the sunrise while a torrent of flame swept through the hall. “Oh, Pell! Pell!” I cried out in agony. “Cannot you come to me?” For a minute—it was scarcely longer—after I called, there was no answer. We stood in that red glare, and round us and beyond us closed the mysterious penumbra of the darkness. Without the circle, where we clung together in our horror, there was the freshness and the sweetness of the spring, and all the little quiet stirs that birds make when they nest at night. And it was out of this bird-haunted darkness that a shape moved suddenly past me into the flames, a shape which as the light edged it round I saw to be that of the old negress. “She is looking for him,” I cried now. “Oh, don’t you see her?” They gathered anxiously round me. “The fire has blinded her,” I heard them say. “She is looking straight at the flames.”