‘Your wife,’ she said, with dry lips, almost inaudibly. ‘Your wife. You must save her. Go--go quickly--and then come back for me--if there is time--oh God, come back for me quickly.’ All was over. He knew he must obey. Without a word, he turned and gathered up the inanimate bundle that was Gundred. In feverish haste he clambered with his burden through the window. Insatiably, terrifically, the fire raged and ravened overhead. As he went he had a last glimpse of Isabel, her face gleaming with fear, set in the strain of mortal anxiety, her white hands clenched and writhing together on the quilt. Then he was out in the darkness, with brands and lumps of burning matter falling thick about his ears, drifting down into the night, to sink at last, hissing, into the invisible sea below. Stumbling, tottering, staggering, he dragged his load. How he ever reached safety he could never have told. A hundred times it seemed as if he must fall. But he struggled on vaguely, half-consciously, through a nightmare, and found himself at last on sure ground, under the shelter of the old Castle walls. Savagely he dropped his unconscious burden on a level spot, then turned to rush back for Isabel. And, at that moment, before his bloodshot eyes, the old wooden wing collapsed into a blazing hell of fire--a vomiting pyramid of sparks and flame. CHAPTER XIII The soul passes in a moment from youth to manhood, through the iron door of a great sorrow. Between past and present stands the bolted portal, and the event of half an hour has set an eternal barrier between the thing one is and the thing one was. Kingston Darnley, as soon as his dazed brain began to understand what had happened, found that he looked back at his past across the haze of fire as on a drama played by strangers. Everything had changed; on that drama a curtain of anguish had descended, and now, when it lifted, the scene had altered, and the old actors had disappeared for ever. Kingston, no less than Isabel, had passed through the furnace. Seared and burned and blackened he emerged from it, changed beyond his own recognition, with passions killed and passions kindled. Somehow, by some mysterious help, he had struggled through the agony, and come out alive; but his consciousness was dazed and bruised, his vitality crushed, his fiery interest in life turned suddenly to the grey ashes of mere endurance.