There was a great roar from the grate as the flames shot up.  Saunders had been a fraction of a second too late with the sheet.  The oil had fallen on to it.  It, too, was burning.

“The whole place will be on fire!” cried Eustace, as he tried to beat out the flames with a blanket.  “It’s no good!  I can’t manage it.  You must open the door, Saunders, and get help.”

Saunders ran to the door and fumbled with the bolts.  The key was stiff in the lock.

“Hurry!” shouted Eustace; “the whole place is ablaze!”

The key turned in the lock at last.  For half a second Saunders stopped to look back.  Afterwards he could never be quite sure as to what he had seen, but at the time he thought that something black and charred was creeping slowly, very slowly, from the mass of flames towards Eustace Borlsover.  For a moment he thought of returning to his friend, but the noise and the smell of the burning sent him running down the passage crying, “Fire!  Fire!” He rushed to the telephone to summon help, and then back to the bathroom—­he should have thought of that before—­for water.  As he burst open the bedroom door there came a scream of terror which ended suddenly, and then the sound of a heavy fall.

The Mass of Shadows

BY ANATOLE FRANCE

     From Mother of Pearl, by Anatole France.  Copyright by John Lane
     Company.  By permission of the publishers.

This tale the sacristan of the church of St. Eulalie at Neuville d’Aumont told me, as we sat under the arbor of the White Horse, one fine summer evening, drinking a bottle of old wine to the health of the dead man, now very much at his ease, whom that very morning he had borne to the grave with full honors, beneath a pall powdered with smart silver tears.

“My poor father who is dead” (it is the sacristan who is speaking,) “was in his lifetime a grave-digger.  He was of an agreeable disposition, the result, no doubt, of the calling he followed, for it has often been pointed out that people who work in cemeteries are of a jovial turn.  Death has no terrors for them; they never give it a thought.  I, for instance, monsieur, enter a cemetery at night as little perturbed as though it were the arbor of the White Horse.  And if by chance I meet with a ghost, I don’t disturb myself in the least about it, for I reflect that he may just as likely have business of his own to attend to as I. I know the habits of the dead, and I know their character.  Indeed, so far as that goes, I know things of which the priests themselves are ignorant.  If I were to tell you all I have seen, you would be astounded.  But a still tongue makes a wise head, and my father, who, all the same, delighted in spinning a yarn, did not disclose a twentieth part of what he knew.  To make up for this he often repeated the same stories, and to my knowledge he told the story of Catherine Fontaine at least a hundred times.