‘I’m hanged if I know,’ replied her husband. ‘We must do something, that’s certain, and pretty quickly. These old rooms will burn like tinder. There must be some way along outside.’ He looked out of the farther window. Now the clamour of the fire was growing every moment more insistent. The night air was aglow, and burning fragments were dropping like meteors towards the sea beneath. ‘Yes,’ said Kingston. ‘There is a little ledge of rock. One couldn’t walk along it in the daytime, but we have no choice. Gundred, you will have to do what you can. You will be able to get along quite safely, if you go quickly and don’t think about it. And I must take charge of Isabel. Isabel, I’m afraid it won’t be very good for your bad leg, but I must carry you somehow. And there is no time to be lost.’ Then Gundred understood everything. In the midst of an orderly comfortable life, it is not easy to understand that one is suddenly hemmed in by inexorable death. But at last the facts of the situation all burst in a shrieking pandemonium upon Gundred’s brain. She faced round upon her husband, read his face, and knew suddenly what terrible thing it was that he was thinking. In that awful moment of unveiled sincerity she saw that she, his wife, came second in his consideration. She was to get away as best she could. It was Isabel that mattered. The slow secret fears of her life roared out into the open, swept down upon her in a storm, and culminated. She clasped her hands for self-control, as the world shook and tottered round her. Desperately she clutched at her escaping senses; then, in a swirl, everything rushed together, grew dark, vanished. She dropped her hands, gave a sharp, moaning cry, and fainted. In the blank silence that followed her fall the voracious bellowing of the fire drew closer and fiercer. ‘My God!’ said Kingston, in the low tone of absolute terror, ‘what are we to do now?’ He looked at Isabel. Between the two helpless women he must make his choice. He must make it instantly, too. He could not by any possibility save both. He looked again from Isabel to Gundred. Isabel’s face, in that supreme hour, was white and wet with anguish, but she said nothing. She saw too well what Gundred’s collapse involved. Kingston still stood glancing from one to the other. He knew which of the two his whole soul cried aloud to save; he knew also which of the two his duty called on him to save. Love and duty were at last impossible to reconcile. On the razor’s edge of agony his mind poised and quivered through a pause that seemed to fill whole delirious hours, yet was come and gone in a flash. Insensibly he was waiting to hear Isabel pronounce his sentence and her own. All her passionate love of life shone in her straining eyes. They implored him, called upon him, cried violently to him for safety. And then, in an instant, Isabel’s eyes were opened, and her soul rose triumphant on its wings.