le, shouting,
cursing, and screaming. Although even yet the flames scarcely appeared
from below, a panic set in which it was hopeless either to remove or
control. Chairs, tables, mattresses were flung, it seemed at random,
from the windows. Mothers, not venturing out on the stairs, cried down
to those below to catch their children. Drunken men, suddenly roused,
reeled fighting and blaspheming into the court. Thieves plied their
trade even on their panic-stricken neighbours, and fell to blows over
the plunder. Still more terrible was the cry to others who remained
within.

Children, huddled into corners, heard that cry, and it glued them where
they stood. The sick and the crippled heard it, and made one last
effort to rise and escape. Even the aged and bedridden, deserted by
all, when they heard it, lay shouting for some one to help.

The flames, pent-up at first and reddening the sky sullenly through the
smoke, suddenly freed themselves and shot up in a wild sheet above the
court. The crowd below answered the outburst with a hideous chorus of
shrieks and yells, and surged madly towards the doomed house.

There was no gleam of pity or devotion in those lurid, upturned faces.
To many of them it was a show, a spectacle; to others a terrible
nightmare, to others a cruel freak of Providence, calling forth curses.

The flames, spreading downwards, had already reached the second floor,
when a window suddenly opened; and a woman with wild dishevelled hair,
put out her head and screamed wildly.

The crowd caught sight of her, and answered with something like a jeer.

"It's Black Sal," some one shouted; "she's kotched it at last."

"Why don't you jump?" shouted another.

"Booh?" shouted a third. "Who skinned the cripple?"

The woman gave a scared look up and down. The flames at that moment
wrapped round the window, and, with a wild howl, the crowd saw her
disappear into the room.

Jeffreys all this time had been standing wedged in the crowd, a
spectator of that hideous scene, and now a witness of this last tragedy.

With a desperate effort he fought his way to the front, hitting right
and left to make himself a passage. It was a minute before he got
through. Then the crowd, realising as if by intuition his purpose,
staggered back, and raised a howl as he dashed into the door of the
half-consumed building.

The first flight of steps was still intact, and he was up it in a
moment; but as he dashed up the