The men were all astir.  One had run across the fields to Malsham to summon the fire-engine, another was gone to remove some animals stabled near the house.

The noise of burning wood was rapidly increasing, the smoke came creeping under the kitchen-door presently, and, five minutes after he had left them, the farm-servant came back to say that he could find no traces of his master.  The parlor was in flames.  If he had been surprised by the fire in his sleep, it must needs be all over with him.  The man urged his mistress to get out of the house at once; the fire was gaining ground rapidly, and it was not likely that anything he or the other men could do would stop its progress.

The women left the kitchen immediately upon this warning, by a door leading into the yard.  It was broad daylight by this time; a chilly sunless morning, and a high wind sweeping across the fields and fanning the flames, which now licked the front wall of Wyncomb Farmhouse.  The total destruction of the place seemed inevitable, unless help from Malsham came very quickly.  The farm servants were running to and fro with buckets of water from the yard, and flinging their contents in at the shattered windows of the front rooms; but this was a small means of checking the destruction.  The house was old, built for the most part of wood, and there seemed little hope for it.

Ellen and the other women went round to the front of the house, and stood there, dismal figures in their scanty raiment, with woollen petticoats pinned across their shoulders, and disordered hair blown about their faces by the damp wind.  They stood grouped together in utter helplessness, looking at the work of ruin with a half-stupid air; almost like the animals who had been hustled from one place of shelter to another, and were evidently lost in wonder as to the cause of their removal.

But presently, as the awful scene before them grew more familiar, the instincts of self-interest arose in each breast.  Mrs. Tadman piteously bewailed the loss of her entire wardrobe, and some mysterious pocket-book which she described plaintively as her “little all.”  She dwelt dolefully upon the merits of each particular article, most especially upon a French-merino dress she had bought for Stephen’s wedding, which would have lasted her a lifetime, and a Paisley shawl, the gift of her deceased husband, which had been in her possession twenty years, and had not so much as a thin place in it.

Nor was the disconsolate matron the only one who lamented her losses.  Sarah Batts, with clasped hands and distracted aspect, wept for the destruction of her “box.”

“There was money in it,” she cried, “money!  Oh, don’t you think the men could get to my room and save it?”

“Money!” exclaimed Mrs. Tadman, sharply, aroused from the contemplation of her own woes by this avowal; “you must be cleverer than I took you for, Sarah Batts, to be able to save money, and yet be always bedizened with some new bit of finery, as you’ve been.”