I will awaken you when my lord returns." The lady obeyed, and soon slept again, her pulse stronger and firmer and her mind at rest.
But Dinah was growing very uneasy.

Far though she was above the street, she heard shouts and cries--muffled and distant truly, but very apparent to her strained faculties--all indicative of alarm and the presence of peril.

She dared not leave her post at the bedside, but the air was becoming so thick with smoke that the patient coughed from time to time, and the nurse was not certain how much longer it would be possible to breathe in it.

She was certain, too, that the place was becoming hot, increasingly hot, each minute.
Oh, where was Lord Desborough?
why did he not come?
At last she stole from the room and into the adjoining chamber, and then indeed an awful sight met her shrinking gaze.
A pillar of lambent flame, which seemed to her to be close at hand, was rising up in the air as though it reached the very heavens.

It swayed slowly this way and that, surrounded by clouds of crimson smoke and a veritable furnace of sparks.