It was only a little after midnight that night when Julie, lying wakeful in the sultry summer darkness, was startled by a person in her room.

“It’s Emma, Miss Ives,” said Mrs. Arbuthnot’s maid, stumbling about, “Mrs. Arbuthnot wants you.”

“She’s ill!” Julie felt rather than said the words, instantly alert and alarmed, and reaching for her wrapper and slippers.

“No, ma’am.  But the doctor feels like he ought to go down to the fire, and she’s nervous—­”

“The fire?”

“Yes’m,” said Emma, simply, “the windmill is afire!”

“And I sleeping through it all!” Miss Ives was still bewildered, fastening the sash of her cobwebby black Mandarin robe as she followed Emma through the passage that joined her suite to the Arbuthnots’.

“Ann, dear—­Emma tells me the laundry’s on fire?” said she, entering the big room.  “I had no idea of it!”

“Nor had we,” the doctor’s wife rejoined eagerly.  “The first we knew was from Emma.  Jim says there’s no danger.  Do you think there is?”

“Certainly not, Ann!” Julie laughed.  “I’ll tell you what we can do,” she added briskly.  “We’ll wheel you down the hall here to the window; you can get a splendid view of the whole thing.”

The doctor approving, the ladies took up their station at a wide hall window that commanded the whole scene.

Outside the velvet blackness and silence of the night were shattered.  The great mill, ugly tongues of flame bursting from the door and windows at its base, was the centre of a talking, shouting, shrill-voiced crowd that was momentarily, in the mysterious fashion of crowds, gathering size.

“Wonderful sight, isn’t it, Ann?”

“Wonderful.  Does this cut off our water supply, Emma?”

“No, Mrs. Arbuthnot.  They’re using the little mill for the engines now.”

“What did they use the big mill for, Emma?”

“The laundry, Miss Ives.  And there’s a sort of flat on the second floor where the laundry woman and her husband—­he’s the man that drives the ’bus—­live.”

“Good heavens!” said Ann.  “I hope they got out!”

“Oh, sure,” said the maid, comfortably.  “It was all of an hour ago the fire started.  They had lots of time.”

The three watched for a while in silence.  Ann’s eyes began to droop from the bright monotony of the flames.

“I believe I’ll wait until the tank falls, Ju? and then go back to my comfortable bed—­Julie, what is it—!”

Her voice rose, keen with terror.  The actress, her hand on her heart, shook her head without turning her eyes from the mill.

For suddenly above the other clamor there had risen one horrible scream, and now, following it, there was almost a silence.

“Why—­what on earth—­” panted Miss Ives, looking to Mrs. Arbuthnot for explanation after an endless interval in which neither stirred.  But again they were interrupted, this time by such an outbreak of shouting and cries from the watching crowd about the mill as made the night fairly ring.