“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 halfway 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 laundry building’s a-caught!”