We all helped.  There were a good many of us by this time,—­Olivia, and Adelaide, and the servant-girls released from below, besides the other Marchbankses, and the Hobarts, and people who came in, until Elijah stopped them.  He shut the heavy walnut doors that led from drawing-room and library to the hall, and turned the great keys in their polished locks.  Then he stood by the garden entrance in the sheltered side-angle, through which we passed with our burdens, and defended that against invasion.  There was now such an absolute order among ourselves that the moral force of it repressed the excitement without that might else have rushed in and overborne us.

“You jest keep back; it’s all right here,” Elijah would say, deliberately and authoritatively, holding the door against unlicensed comers; and boys and men stood back as they might have done outside the shine and splendor and privilege of an entertainment.

It lasted till we got well through; till we had gone, one by one, down the field, across to our house, the short way, back and forth, leaving the china, pile after pile, safe in our cellar-kitchen.

Meanwhile, without our thinking of it, Barbara had been locked out upon the stairs.  Mother had found a tall Fayal clothes-basket, and had collected in it, carefully, little pictures and precious things that could be easily moved, and might be as easily lost or destroyed.  Barbara mounted guard over this, watching for a right person to whom to deliver it.

Standing there, like Casabianca, rough men rushed by her to get up to the roof.  The hall was filling with a crowd, mostly of the curious, untrustworthy sort, for the work just then lay elsewhere.

So Barbara held by, only drawing back with the basket, into an angle of the wide landing.  Nobody must seize it heedlessly; things were only laid in lightly, for careful handling.  In it were children s photographs, taken in days that they had grown away from; little treasures of art and remembrance, picked up in foreign travel, or gifts of friends; all sorts of priceless odds and ends that people have about a house, never thinking what would become of them in a night like this.  So Barbara stood by.

Suddenly somebody, just come, and springing in at the open door, heard his name.

“Harry!  Help me with this!” And Harry Goldthwaite pushed aside two men at the foot of the staircase, lifted up a small boy and swung him over the baluster, and ran up to the landing.

“Take hold of it with me,” said Barbara, hurriedly.  “It is valuable.  We must carry it ourselves.  Don’t let anybody touch it.  Over to Mrs. Hobart’s.”

“Hendee!” called out Harry to Mark Hendee, who appeared below.  “Keep those people off, will you?  Make way!” And so they two took the big basket steadily by the ears, and went away with it together.  The first we knew about it was when, on their way back, they came down upon our line of march toward Elijah’s door.