“No, nothing; till they come to carry me away somewhere.  I’m all one burning pain.”

His eyes closed, and he seemed to sink into a kind of stupor.  Ellen called to one of the men.  They might carry him to some place of shelter surely, at once, where a doctor could be summoned, and something done for his relief.  There was a humble practitioner resident at Crosber, that is to say, about two miles from Wyncomb.  One of the farm-servants might take a horse and gallop across the fields to fetch this man.

Robert Dunn, the bailiff, heard her cries presently and came to her.  He was very much shocked by his master’s condition, and at once agreed to the necessity of summoning a surgeon.  He proposed that they should carry Stephen Whitelaw to some stables, which lay at a safe distance from the burning house, and make up some kind of bed for him there.  He ran back to dispatch one of the men to Crosber, and returned immediately with another to remove his master.

But when they tried to raise the injured man between them, he cried out to them to let him alone, they were murdering him.  Let him lie where he was; he would not be moved.  So he was allowed to lie there, with his head on his wife’s lap, and his tortured body covered by a coat, which one of the men brought him.  His eyes closed again, and for some time he lay without the slightest motion.

The fire was gaining ground every instant, and there was yet no sign of the engine from Malsham; but Ellen Whitelaw scarcely heeded the work of destruction.  She was thinking only of the helpless stricken creature lying with his head upon her lap; thinking of him perhaps in this hour of his extremity with all the more compassion, because he had always been obnoxious to her.  She prayed for the rapid arrival of the surgeon, who must surely be able to give some relief to her husband’s sufferings, she thought.  It seemed dreadful for him to be lying like this, with no attempt made to lessen his agony.  After a long interval he lifted his scorched eyelids slowly, and looked at her with a strange dim gaze.

“The west wing,” he muttered; “is that burnt?”

“No, Stephen, not yet; but there’s little hope they’ll save any part of the house.”

“They must save that; the rest don’t matter—­I’m insured heavily; but they must save the west wing.”

His wife concluded from this that he had kept some of his money in one of those western rooms.  The seed-room perhaps, that mysterious padlocked chamber, where she had heard the footstep.  And yet she had heard him say again and again that he never kept an unnecessary shilling in the house, and that every pound he had was out at interest.  But such falsehoods and contradictions are common enough amongst men of miserly habits; and Stephen Whitelaw would hardly be so anxious about those western rooms unless something of value were hidden away there.  He closed his eyes again, and lay groaning faintly for some time; then opened them suddenly with a frightened look and asked, in the same tone,