prepared by a leak in the overheated chimney between the floors, that even the excitement of fear and exertion was spared the survivors.  There was bewilderment and stupor, but neither uproar nor confusion.  People found themselves wandering in the woods, half awake and half dressed, having descended from the balconies and leaped from the windows,—­they knew not how.  Others on the upper floor neither awoke nor moved from their beds, but were suffocated without a cry.  From the first an instinctive idea of the hopelessness of combating the conflagration possessed them all; to a blind, automatic feeling to flee the building was added the slow mechanism of the somnambulist; delicate women walked speechlessly, but securely, along ledges and roofs from which they would have fallen by the mere light of reason and of day.  There was no crowding or impeding haste in their dumb exodus.  It was only when Mrs. Barker awoke disheveled in the courtyard, and with an hysterical outcry rushed back into the hotel, that there was any sign of panic.

Mrs. Horncastle, who was standing near, fully dressed as from some night-long vigil, quickly followed her.  The half-frantic woman was making directly for her own apartments, whose windows those in the courtyard could see were already belching smoke.  Suddenly Mrs. Horncastle stopped with a bitter cry and clasped her forehead.  It had just flashed upon her that Mrs. Barker had told her only a few hours before that Sta had been removed with the nurse to the upper floor!  It was not the forgotten child that Mrs. Barker was returning for, but her diamonds!  Mrs. Horncastle called her; she did not reply.  The smoke was already pouring down the staircase.  Mrs. Horncastle hesitated for a moment only, and then, drawing a long breath, dashed up the stairs.  On the first landing she stumbled over something—­the prostrate figure of the nurse.  But this saved her, for she found that near the floor she could breathe more freely.  Before her appeared to be an open door.  She crept along towards it on her hands and knees.  The frightened cry of a child, awakened from its sleep in the dark, gave her nerve to rise, enter the room, and dash open the window.  By the flashing light she could see a little figure rising from a bed.  It was Sta.  There was not a moment to be lost, for the open window was beginning to draw the smoke from the passage.  Luckily, the boy, by some childish instinct, threw his arms round her neck and left her hands free.  Whispering him to hold tight, she clambered out of the window.  A narrow ledge of cornice scarcely wide enough for her feet ran along the house to a distant balcony.  With her back to the house she zigzagged her feet along the cornice to get away from the smoke, which now poured directly from the window.  Then she grew dizzy; the weight of the child on her bosom seemed to be toppling her forward towards the abyss below.  She closed her eyes, frantically grasping the child