e could not persuade her immediately to leave the cheerless
spot, spoke of other things. He was voluble about the cause of the fire,
hinting at a dire "anarchistic" plot of some discharged workingmen.
There was much talk in their neighborhood at this time of the efforts of
"anarchists" to destroy rich people's property by incendiary fires.
Adelle, with her face turned to the wall, moaned,--

"Go away!"

And at last Archie went.

XLIII

Archie was voluble about this non-essential in face of the personal
tragedy, anxious to state his theory of the disaster, because he had
more than an uncomfortable consciousness of what the servants and the
men on the place were saying about it. And that was that the master
himself had set the house on fire. It had started in the large, empty
drawing-room, in which the decorators had been still working with
paints, oils, and inflammable stuff. The workmen, however, had not been
in the room for hours before the fire started. The only person who had
entered it during the evening was Archie himself, for it was on his way
from his library to his suite of rooms in the other wing. He had sat up
late as usual after the guests had gone, smoking and drinking by
himself, then had stumbled drowsily through the house to his bedroom,
and on the way doubtless had dropped a match or lighted cigar in the
drawing-room, and in his fuddled condition had failed to notice what he
had done.

The first person to discover the fire had happened to be Tom Clark, who
had been returning late from the village to his shack on the hill, and
had seen an unnatural glow through the long French windows of the
drawing-room. By the time he had roused the house servants in their
remote quarters and set off for the garage to summon help, the
drawing-room and the adjoining hall were a mass of flame. When he
returned with the new hose-cart and helpers the servants had already
opened the large front door, admitting the wind, which blew the fire
through the stairway like a bellows and completed the destruction of the
house. Clark knew as well as Ferguson, the superintendent, and a
half-dozen others, that when Archie emerged from his rooms on the ground
floor, he was not fully undressed: though it was past one in the
morning, he had not yet gone to bed. And although no one said anything,
habitually cautious as such people usually are when indiscretion may
involve them with their masters, they had easily made the corre