Now! To think--to collect himself--to fight down this choking in his throat! If he could only once gain the well-house--the wheel--unobserved! His--Bagott’s closet! He was there--rushing for the casement--and at the very moment blows came raining on it, and the glass crashed. Staggering back, a very extremity of horror paralysed his reason. No instinct remained to him but the last instinct of despair--to escape upwards, upwards, from the earth that had betrayed him. The stairs--on the stairs now--and always frantically mounting them. The roof at last might give him safety. And, even while he climbed, they were cutting off from beneath his feet his final hope of escape: and, even while he climbed, his Nemesis was toiling in his wake. She had heard him, and risen, ghastly and bloody, to her feet, and followed, dropping her own crimson trail, on his track. It was the doom of both. For a cry had risen that the soldiers were coming, and that the work that was to do must be done after a more swift and comprehensive fashion than that designed, if the accursed spy was not to slip through their hands. He had vanished from the window: those few who had succeeded in forcing an entrance were still hurrying aimlessly hither and thither, in vain search of their prey. They were called out. Senseless, brutal in its destructive frenzy, the mob gave no thought but to the securing of its purpose by any foul reckless means; gave no thought to the safety of her, their own secret confederate and informer, who was still alive somewhere within the building. They formed a hasty cordon about the walls, and, carrying their massed fuel to a dozen kindling points, flung it in heaps through doors and windows and set fire to it. And almost in a moment, incredible as it might seem, the place was alight and roaring. It had been a hot summer, the house was dry to its attics, and the old laths and timber caught like touchwood. In a few minutes it was blazing like a gorse-thicket: the pools of flame, like pools of quicksilver, touched and became one, which, involving the whole in one furious conflagration, went rushing up in a single cone of volcanic fire. Soon the heat was so great that the crowd had to fall farther back to contemplate its own handiwork. Some, taking refuge in the shelter of the gateway, looked forth, half awed over the magnitude of their achievement. And, as they watched, suddenly there was a little figure on the roof, and it was throwing out its arms in a frantic appeal for the help that no power on earth could any longer afford it.