I let her put on her things and come down with me to the lodge-gate to watch.  I was afraid to go any farther, and there we waited, without even the relief of a report, till we had heard the great clock strike quarter after quarter, and were expecting it to strike eleven, when steps came near at last, and Eustace opened the gate.  We threw ourselves upon him, and he cried out with surprise, then said, “He is alive!”

“Who!  Harold?”

“Harold!  Nonsense.  What should be the matter with Harold?  But he is going to stay with him—­Yolland I mean—­for the night!  It was all his confounded experiments.  It was very well that I went down—­ nothing was being done without a head to direct, but they always know what to be at when I come among them.”

No one there knew the cause of the accident, except that it had taken place in Mr. Yolland’s laboratory, where he had been trying experiments.  The house itself had been violently shattered, and those nearest had suffered considerably.  Happily, it stood in a yard of its own, so that none adjoined it, and though the fronts of the two opposite “Dragon’s Heads” had broken windows and torn doors, no person within them had been more than stunned and bruised.  But the former “Dragon’s Head” itself had become a mere pile of stones, bricks, and timbers.  The old couple in charge had happily been out, and stood in dismay over the heap, which Harold and a few of the men were trying to remove, in the dismal search for Mr. Yolland and the boy he employed to assist him.  The boy was found first, fearfully burnt about the face and hands, but protected from being crushed by the boards which had fallen slantwise over him.  And under another beam, which guarded his head, but rested on his leg, lay young Yolland.

Harold’s strength had raised the beam, and he was drawn out.  He revived as the night air blew on his face, looked up as Harold lifted him, said, “I have it,” and fainted the next moment.  They had taken him to his lodgings, where Dr. Kingston had set the broken leg and bound the damaged rib, but could not yet pronounce on the other injuries, and Harold had taken on himself the watch for the night.

The explanation that we all held by was, that the damage was caused by an officious act of the assistant, who, perceiving that it was growing dark, fired a match, and began to light the gas at the critical moment of the experiment, by which the means of obtaining the utmost heat at the smallest expense of fuel was to be attained.  It was one of those senseless acts that no one would have thought of forbidding; and though the boy, on recovering his senses, owned that the last thing he remembered was getting the matches and Mr. Yolland shouting to stop him, there were many who never would believe anything but that it was blundering of his, and that he was a dangerous and mischievous person to have in the town.