"Come, Bella, come!" cried Cyril to the panting girl, and took her arm within his own, "we must see who set it on fire."
Bella got her second wind and ran like Atalanta. They speedily outstripped the crowd, and were almost the first to cross the planks over the boundary channel. Inglis and his policemen were already running up the corn-path. Why they should run, or why the villagers should run, Cyril did not know, as there was no water and no fire brigade, hose, or engine, and no chance of saving the ancient mansion. He and Bella ran because they wished to see the last of the old home.
"Who can have set it on fire?" Cyril kept asking.
"Perhaps a tramp," suggested Bella breathlessly, but in her heart she felt that something more serious was in the wind. A strange dread gripped her heart, and the name of Mrs. Vand was on the tip of her tongue, although she never uttered it.
As the weather was warm and the ground dry--for there had been no rain since the electric storm which raged when Vand and Durgo had gone down into the muddy waters of the boundary channel--the old house flamed furiously. The dry wood caught like tinder, and when Cyril and the girl arrived the whole place was hidden weirdly by dense black smoke, amidst which flashed sinister points of fire. Inglis and his men attempted to enter the house, but were driven back by the fierce flames which burst from the cracking windows; also the great door was closed and could not be forced open. They were forced to retreat, and the inspector nearly tumbled over Miss Faith, as Bella was now called.
"Can't you get her out?" asked Inglis breathlessly.
"Get her out!" cried the girl, terrified, and half grasping his meaning.
"Mrs. Vand; she is in there," and he pointed to the furnace of flame.
Bella screamed and Cyril turned pale. "You must be mistaken," he said.
"No, no," replied the inspector, who was greatly agitated, for even his official phlegm was not proof against the terror of the position. "The London police wired to me at Pierside that Mrs. Vand had gone down to Marshely. We waited at the station to arrest her, but she got off at a previous station and was seen by your village policeman to run across the marshes. He wired to my Pierside office, and the wire was repeated to the station we waited at. We got a fly and hurried here only to see the smoke. I cried out 'Fire!' to you as we passed. Great heavens, what a blaze!"