the stable-boy in answer to a question from
Frau Dellwig as he passed with his full pail, spilling the water at
every step.

"_Ach_, I thought so," she said, glancing at Anna.

Anna made a passionate movement, and ran down the steps after the girl
Mietze. Frau Dellwig could not but follow, which she did slowly, at a
disapproving distance.

But Dellwig galloped into the yard at that moment, his horse covered
with sweat, and his loud and peremptory orders extracted the ancient
engine from its shed, got the horses harnessed to it, and after what
Anna thought an eternity it rattled away. When it started, the whole sky
to the south was like one dreadful sheet of blood.

"It is the stables," he said to Anna.

"Herr von Lohm's?"

"Yes. They cannot be saved."

"And the house?"

He shrugged his shoulders. "It's a windy night," he said, "and the wind
is blowing that way. There are pine-trees between. Everything is as dry
as cinders."

"The stables--are they insured?"

But Dellwig was off again, after the engine.

"What can we do, Letty? What can we _do_?" cried Anna, turning to Letty
when the sound of the wheels had died away and only the hurried bell was
heard above the whistling and banging of the wind. "It's horrible here,
listening to that bell tolling, and looking at the sky. If I could throw
one single bucketful of water on the fire I should not feel so useless,
so utterly, utterly of no use or good for anything."

Neither of them had ever seen a fire, and horror had seized them both.
The night seemed so dark, the world all round so black, except in that
one dreadful spot. Anna knew Axel could not afford to lose money. From
things Trudi had said, from things the princess had said, she knew it.
There was at Lohm, she felt rather than knew, an abundance of everything
necessary to ordinary comfortable living, as there generally is in the
country on farms; but money was scarce, and a series of bad seasons,
perhaps even one bad season, or anything out of the way happening, might
make it very scarce, might make the further proper farming of the place
impossible. Suppose the stables were not insured, where would the money
come from to rebuild them? And the horses--she had heard that horses
went mad with fright in a fire, and refused to leave their stables. And
the house--suppose this cruel wind made the checking of the fire
impossible, and it licked its way across the trees to Axel's house? "Oh,
what can we _do_?"