When her lungs ceased to labour painfully, she took her courage in both hands and began to explore, groping blindly through darkness, encountering nothing till she blundered into a table which held a glass lamp for paraffin oil, like those in use below.

Fumbling over the top of the table, she found matches, struck one, and set its fire to the wick.

The flame waxed and grew steady in a crusted chimney, revealing a room with a slant ceiling and two dormer windows, boarded; in one corner a cot-bed with tumbled blankets, near this a low wooden stand, with a pipe, spirit lamp, and other paraphernalia of an opium smoker—­no chairs, not another stick of furniture of any kind.

Removing the lamp, the girl set it on the floor, and pushed the table over against the door.  By not so long as half a minute would its reinforcement delay Victor when he made up his mind to get in.  But in such emergencies the human kind is not impatient of the most futile expedients.

There was nothing more she could do.  She stood still, listening.  The rattle of pistol fire three floors below continued in fits and starts, but the sound of it was oddly unreal, resembling more stammering explosions of a string of firecrackers than snaps of the whiplash of Death.

She tried one of the windows without encouragement, but at the other found a board with a loose end, which she pried aside, till through begrimed glass she could see a ghastly, weeping sky of daybreak and, by craning her neck, peer down into the dark gully of the street.

At first she thought it empty; but presently her straining vision made out two huddled shapes upon the farther sidewalk, close under the walls of a public house whose sign she could just barely decipher:  the Red Moon.

Then, about to draw back from the window, she saw five men, oddly foreshortened figures from that lofty coign of view, leave the Red Moon by one of its bar entrances, bearing between them a heavy beam of wood, and with this improvised battering-ram aimed at the door to the besieged house, charge awkwardly across the cobbles.

The house spat fire from door and windows, a withering blast.  In the middle of the street the beam was abandoned, three of its fool-hardy bearers took to their heels, each shaping an individual course, while one lay still upon the wet black stones, and another, apparently wounded in the legs, sought pitifully to drag himself by his arms, inch by inch, out of the zone of fire.  But presently his efforts grew feeble, then he, too, lay stirless, prone in the sluicing rain.

The girl shrank back from the window, hiding her eyes as if to blot out that picture.

The light, that is to say the absence of it in true sense, the angle of view, and the distance, all had conspired to prevent her from making sure that neither her father nor Karslake were of those four whose broken bodies cluttered the street.  But the fear and uncertainty were maddening....