Nicky-Nan rolled over on his side and, perceiving the candle to be burnt down to a short inch, hastily blew it out.  Almost in the act of relaxing the elbow on which he had raised himself for this effort he dropped asleep to his pillow.

For three hours he lay like a log.  Then his troubled brain began to reassert itself.  At about two in the morning he sat bolt upright in his bed.  For twenty minutes or so he had been thinking rather than dreaming, yet with his thought held captive by sleep.

He reached for his matchbox and struck a light. . . .  The whole world was after him, hunting him down, tearing down the house above his head! . . .  Well, he would go down with the house.  Pamphlett, or Government, might take his house:  but there was the old hiding-cupboard to the right of the chimney-breast. . . .

When they summoned him to-morrow, he would have vanished.  Only by uncovering his last shelter should they discover what was left of him.  He would perish with the house.

He lit the candle and carried it to the cupboard; opened this, and peered into the well at his feet:  lifted one of the loose bottom-boards, and, holding himself steady by a grip on the scurtain, thrust a naked leg down, feeling into vacancy.

The ball of his foot touched some substance, hard and apparently firm.  He supposed it to be a lower ceiling of the hole, and, after pressing once or twice to make sure, put all his weight upon it.

With a creak and a rush of masonry the whole second flooring of the cupboard gave way beneath him, leaving his invalid leg dangling, in excruciating pain.  But that the crook of his elbow caught across the scurtain (shooting darts as of fire up the jarred funny-bone), he had made a part of the avalanche, the noise of which was enough to wake the dead.  Luckily, too, he had set his candle on the planching floor, just wide of the cupboard entrance, and it stood burning as though nothing had happened.

With pain which surely must be worse than any pain of death, he heaved himself back and on to the bedroom floor again.  The cascade of plaster, timber, masonry, must (he judged) have shot itself straight down into his parlour below.

He picked up the candle, and warily—­while his leg wrung him with torture at every step—­crept down the stairs to explore.

The parlour door opened inwards.  He thrust it open for a short way quite easily.  Then of a sudden it jammed:  but it left an aperture through which he could squeeze himself.  He did so, and held the candle aloft.

While he stared, first at a hole in the ceiling, then at the “scree” which had broken through it and lay spread, fan-shaped, on the solid floor at his feet, he heard a footstep, and Mrs Penhaligon’s voice in the passage without.

“Mr Nanjivell!  Is that Mr Nanjivell?”

“Yes, ma’am!”

“Oh, what has happened?”

“Nothing, ma’am.  Only a downrush of soot in the chimney,” answered Nicky-Nan, gasping:  for the heap of dust and mortar at his feet lay scattered all over with golden coins!