ed that they were not
unmindful of this final duty....

The verandah was empty, and he was just about to enter the House, when
through the west door came a figure, breathing hard and bent apparently
on the same errand. Thomas prepared for battle, determined that no
straggler of the enemy should now wrest from him victory, but, as the
figure came into the faint glow at the doorway, he recognized it as
Heritage. And at the same moment he heard something which made his
tense nerves relax. Away on the right came sounds, a thud of galloping
horses on grass and the jingle of bridle reins and the voices of men.
It was the real thing at last. It is a sad commentary on his career,
but now for the first time in his brief existence Thomas Yownie felt
charitably disposed towards the police.

The Poet, since we left him blaspheming on the roof of the Tower, had
been having a crowded hour of most inglorious life. He had started to
descend at a furious pace, and his first misadventure was that he
stumbled and dropped Dickson's pistol over the parapet. He tried to
mark where it might have fallen in the gloom below, and this lost him
precious minutes. When he slithered through the trap into the attic
room, where he had tried to hold up the attack, he discovered that it
was full of smoke which sought in vain to escape by the narrow window.
Volumes of it were pouring up the stairs, and when he attempted to
descend he found himself choked and blinded. He rushed gasping to the
window, filled his lungs with fresh air, and tried again, but he got no
farther than the first turn, from which he could see through the cloud
red tongues of flame in the ground room. This was solemn indeed, so he
sought another way out. He got on the roof, for he remembered a
chimney-stack, cloaked with ivy, which was built straight from the
ground, and he thought he might climb down it.

He found the chimney and began the descent confidently, for he had once
borne a good reputation at the Montanvert and Cortina. At first all
went well, for stones stuck out at decent intervals like the rungs of a
ladder, and roots of ivy supplemented their deficiencies. But presently
he came to a place where the masonry had crumbled into a cave, and left
a gap some twenty feet high. Below it he could dimly see a thick mass
of ivy which would enable him to cover the further forty feet to the
ground, but at that cave he stuck most finally. All around the lime and
stone ha