And where all this time was Richard?  Victor was asking that question—­Victor, just arrived, and followed by the whole household of Collingwood.  They were the last to waken, and they came with headlong haste; but Victor’s longer strides outran them all, and when Arthur appeared, he was asking frantically for his master.  The negroes in their fright had forgotten him entirely, and the first words which greeted Arthur were, “Mr. Harrington is in the building!”

“Where? where?” he shrieked, darting away, and dragging Victor with him.

“In Nina’s room.  He would sleep there,” Victor answered, and with another cry of horror, Arthur sprang to the rear of the building, discovering that the stairs leading to the Den were comparatively unharmed as yet.

“Who will save him?” he screamed, and he turned toward Victor, who intuitively drew back from incurring the great peril.

There was no one to volunteer, and Arthur said,

“I will do it myself.”

Instantly a hundred voices were raised against it.  It were worse than madness, they said.  The fire must have caught in the vicinity of that room, and Richard was assuredly dead.

“He may not be, and if he is not, I will save him or perish too,” was Arthur’s heroic reply, as he sprang up the long winding stairs, near which the flames were roaring like some long pent up volcano.

He reached the door of the Den.  It was bolted, but with superhuman strength he shook it down, staggering backward as the dense cloud of yellowish smoke rolled over and around him, warning him not to advance.  But Arthur heeded no warning then.  By the light which illumined the entire front of the house, he saw that two sides of the room were not yet touched; the bed in the recess was unharmed, but Richard was not there, and a terrible fear crept over Arthur lest he had perished in his attempt to escape.  Suddenly he remembered Nina’s cell, and groping his way through fire and smoke, he opened the oaken door, involuntarily breathing a prayer of thanksgiving when he saw the tall form stretched upon the empty bedstead.  He had probably mistaken the way out, and by entering here, had prolonged his life, for save through the glass ventilator the smoke could not find entrance to that spot.  Arthur knew that he was living, for the lips moved once and whispered, “Edith,” causing Arthur’s brain to reel, and the cold sweat to start from every pore as he thought for what and for whom he was saving his rival.  Surely in that terrible hour, in Nina’s cell, with death staring him in the face on every side, Arthur St. Claire atoned for all the past, and by his noble unselfishness proved how true and brave he was.

Snatching from the nail the heavy sack, he wound it round Richard’s head to shield him from the flames, then recollecting that on the bed without there was a thick rose blanket, he wrapped that too around him, and bending himself with might and main, bore him in his arms across the heated floor and out into the narrow hall, growing sick and faint when he saw the wall of fire now rolling steadily up the stairway.