t forward, and, being the
youngest of the three, I reached the house an easy first. I drew up,
panting, and turned to wait for the others. But, as I turned, something
moving a little distance away caught my eye, and in that moment I swear
I experienced the most overwhelming and singular shock of surprise and
terror I have ever known, or can conceive as possible.

For the front door was open, and the waist of the house being narrow, I
could see through the hall into the dining-room beyond, and so out on to
the back lawn, and there I saw no less a sight than the figure of Miss
Wragge--running. Even at that distance it was plain that she had seen
me, and was coming fast towards me, running with the frantic gait of a
terror-stricken woman. She had recovered the use of her legs.

Her face was a livid grey, as of death itself, but the general
expression was one of laughter, for her mouth was gaping, and her eyes,
always bright, shone with the light of a wild merriment that seemed the
merriment of a child, yet was singularly ghastly. And that very second,
as she fled past me into her brother's arms behind, I smelt again most
unmistakably the odour of burning, and to this day the smell of smoke
and fire can come very near to turning me sick with the memory of what I
had seen.

Fast on her heels, too, came the terrified attendant, more mistress of
herself, and able to speak--which the old lady could not do--but with a
face almost, if not quite, as fearful.

"We were down by the bushes in the sun,"--she gasped and screamed in
reply to Colonel Wragge's distracted questionings,--"I was wheeling the
chair as usual when she shrieked and leaped--I don't know exactly--I was
too frightened to see--Oh, my God! she jumped clean out of the
chair--_and ran_! There was a blast of hot air from the wood, and she
hid her face and jumped. She didn't make a sound--she didn't cry out, or
make a sound. She just ran."

But the nightmare horror of it all reached the breaking point a few
minutes later, and while I was still standing in the hall temporarily
bereft of speech and movement; for while the doctor, the Colonel and the
attendant were half-way up the staircase, helping the fainting woman to
the privacy of her room, and all in a confused group of dark figures,
there sounded a voice behind me, and I turned to see the butler, his
face dripping with perspiration, his eyes starting out of his head.

"The laundry's on fire!" he cried; "the lau