The game lasted for about an hour or so, at the end of which time the farmer threw himself back in his chair with a yawn, and pronounced that he had had enough of it.  The old eight-day clock in the lobby struck ten soon after this, and the two women rose to retire, leaving Stephen to his night’s libations, and not sorry to escape out of the room, which he had converted into a kind of oven or Turkish bath by means of the roaring fire he had insisted upon keeping up all the evening.  He was left, therefore, with his bottle of rum about half emptied, to finish his night’s entertainment after his own fashion.

Mrs. Tadman ventured a mild warning about the fire when she wished him good night; but as she did not dare to hint that there had been any neglect in the chimney-sweeping, her counsel went for very little.  Mr. Whitelaw threw on another pine-log directly the two women had left him, and addressed himself to the consumption of a fresh glass of rum-and-water.

“There’s nothing like being on the safe side,” he muttered to himself with an air of profound wisdom.  “I don’t want to be laid up with the rheumatics, if I can help it.”

He finished the contents of his glass, and went softly out of the room, carrying a candle with him.  He was absent about ten minutes, and then came back to resume his comfortable seat by the fire, and mixed himself another glass of grog with the air of a man who was likely to finish the bottle.

While he sat drinking in his slow sensual way, his young wife slept peacefully enough in one of the rooms above him.  Early rising and industrious habits will bring sleep, even when the heart is hopeless and the mind is weary.  Mrs. Whitelaw slept a tranquil dreamless sleep to-night, while Mrs. Tadman snored with a healthy regularity in a room on the opposite side of the passage.

There was a faint glimmer of dawn in the sky, a cold wet dawn, when Ellen was awakened suddenly by a sound that bewildered and alarmed her.  It was almost like the report of a pistol, she thought, as she sprang out of bed, pale and trembling.  It was not a pistol shot, however, only a handful of gravel thrown sharply against her window.

“Stephen,” she cried, half awake and very much, frightened, “what was that?” But, to her surprise, she found that her husband was not in the room.

While she sat on the edge of her bed hurrying some of her clothes on, half mechanically, and wondering what that startling sound could have been, a sudden glow of red light shone in at her window, and at the same moment her senses, which had been only half awakened before, told her that there was an atmosphere of smoke in the room.

She rushed to the door, forgetting that to open it was perhaps to admit death, and flung it open.  Yes, the passage was full of smoke, and there was a strange crackling sound below.

There could be little doubt as to what had happened—­the house was on fire.  She remembered how repeatedly Mrs. Tadman had declared that Stephen would inevitably set the place on fire some night or other, and how little weight she had attached to the dismal prophecy.  But the matron’s fears had not been groundless, it seemed.  The threatened calamity had come.