articles of furniture out on to the
pavement.

'That you, Mr Biffen?' cried someone to him.

He recognised the face of a fellow-lodger.

'Is it possible to get up to my room?' broke frantically from his lips.

'You'll never get up there. It's that--Briggs'--the epithet was
alliterative--''as upset his lamp, and I 'ope he'll--well get roasted to
death.'

Biffen leaped on to the threshold, and crashed against Mrs Willoughby,
the landlady, who was carrying a huge bundle of household linen.

'I told you to look after that drunken brute;' he said to her. 'Can I
get upstairs?'

'What do I care whether you can or not!' the woman shrieked. 'My God!
And all them new chairs as I bought--!'

He heard no more, but bounded over a confusion of obstacles, and in a
moment was on the landing of the first storey. Here he encountered a
man who had not lost his head, a stalwart mechanic engaged in slipping
clothes on to two little children.

'If somebody don't drag that fellow Briggs down he'll be dead,' observed
the man. 'He's layin' outside his door. I pulled him out, but I can't do
no more for him.'

Smoke grew thick on the staircase. Burning was as yet confined to that
front room on the second floor tenanted by Briggs the disastrous, but
in all likelihood the ceiling was ablaze, and if so it would be all but
impossible for Biffen to gain his own chamber, which was at the back on
the floor above. No one was making an attempt to extinguish the fire;
personal safety and the rescue of their possessions alone occupied the
thoughts of such people as were still in the house. Desperate with the
dread of losing his manuscript, his toil, his one hope, the realist
scarcely stayed to listen to a warning that the fumes were impassable;
with head bent he rushed up to the next landing. There lay Briggs,
perchance already stifled, and through the open door Biffen had a
horrible vision of furnace fury. To go yet higher would have been
madness but for one encouragement: he knew that on his own storey was a
ladder giving access to a trap-door, by which he might issue on to the
roof, whence escape to the adjacent houses would be practicable. Again a
leap forward!

In fact, not two minutes elapsed from his commencing the ascent of the
stairs to the moment when, all but fainting, he thrust the key into his
door and fell forward into purer air. Fell, for he was on his knees, and
had begun to suffer from a sense of failing power, a sick whirlin