Suddenly the mad impulse in his heart went out, and he leaned his head nearer to the crack of the door, and strained his ears to hear.  He could make out no word of the song, yet the singing came to him with a thrill that set his lips apart and brought a staring wonder into his eyes.  In the room below him, fifteen hundred miles from civilization, Black Roger and Carmin Fanchet were singing “Home, Sweet Home!”

An hour later David looked through one of the barred windows upon a world lighted by a splendid moon.  He could see the dark edge of the distant forest that rimmed in the chateau, and about him seemed to be a level meadow, with here and there the shadow of a building in which the lights were out.  Stars were thick in the sky, and a strange quietness hovered over the world he looked upon.  From below him floated up now and then a perfume of tobacco smoke.  The guard under his window was awake, but he made no sound.

A little later he undressed, put out the two lights in his room, and stretched himself between the cool, white sheets on the couch.  After a time he slept, but it was a restless slumber filled with troubled dreams.  Twice he was half awake, and the second time it seemed to him his nostrils sensed a sharper tang of smoke than that of burning tobacco, yet he did not fully rouse himself, and the hours passed, and new sounds and smells that rose in the night impinged themselves upon him only as a part of the troublous fabric of his dreams.  But at last there came a shock, something which beat over these things which chained him, and seized upon his consciousness, demanding that he rouse himself, open his eyes, and get up.

He obeyed the command, and before he was fully awake, found himself on his feet.  It was still dark, but he heard voices, voices no longer subdued, but filled with a wild note of excitement and command.  And what he smelled was not the smell of tobacco smoke!  It was heavy in his room.  It filled his lungs.  His eyes were smarting with the sting of it.

Then came vision, and with a startled cry he leaped to a window.  To the north and east he looked out upon a flaming world!

With his fist he rubbed his smarting eyes.  The moon was gone.  The gray he saw outside must be the coming of dawn, ghostly with that mist of smoke that had come into his room.  He could see shadowy figures of men running swiftly in and out and disappearing, and he could hear the voices of women and children, and from beyond the edge of the forest to the west came the howling of many dogs.  One voice rose above the others.  It was Black Roger’s, and at its commands little groups of figures shot out into the gray smoke-gloom and did not appear again.

North and east the sky was flaming sullen red, and a breath of air blowing gently in David’s face told him the direction of the wind.  The chateau lay almost in the center of the growing line of conflagration.