She knew his room.  It was but a step to it, and the door opened easily.  The nurse was fast asleep, so fast that poor Hannah’s warning cry, as she stumbled in, hardly aroused her.  On the bed lay Jason, so thin, so white, so corpse-like, she would hardly have known him.  In the fierce strength of her despair it was no task to lift that emaciated body, but, ah! how to get out of the house with it?  For when she turned she saw that the hall was now wholly on fire.

But she did not hesitate.  Wrapping him quickly and tenderly in a blanket taken from the bed, she rushed out into the flames.

Meanwhile Peter Hopkins and his ‘hired man’ had been aroused by Hannah’s first screams, and had hurriedly scrambled on a portion of their clothing and rushed out.  They had been in time—­running quickly across the field—­to see Hannah disappear behind the house.  Neither of them supposed for an instant that she had entered it.

Trying the front door, and finding it fast, Peter uplifted his stout foot and kicked it crashing in, but he found it impossible to enter by the breach he had made.  The front stairway was all in flames, and the fierce heat drove him hopelessly back.  Then they ran around to the rear.  By this time the entire upper portion of the building seemed to be one mass of fire and smote, and now they could hear shrill and terrible shrieks, evidently proceeding from the suddenly awakened inmates.  They ran to the kitchen door and burst it in.

As they did so there rushed towards them from the foot of the kitchen stairs some horrible, blazing, and unnatural shape, that came stumbling but swiftly forward.  With it came smoke and flame and a horrible sound of stifled moans.

At the approach of this strange and unsightly object they sprang back amazed, and it passed them headlong into the open air; passed them and dropped apart, as it were, into the stream before the door.

For many years thereafter the slumbers of Farmer Hopkins were disturbed by visions of what he saw when the two two parts of that terrible apparition were taken from the water.

There lay Hannah Lee, no longer beautiful and fresh as the morning, but blackened, crisped, scorched and shrunken, with all her wealth of silken hair burned to ashes, with all her clear loveliness of complexion gone forever.  And there lay Jason Fletcher, unburned,—­so carefully had she covered him as she fled,—­but senseless, and to all appearance a corpse.

Thus Hannah Lee went through fire and water, even unto worse than death, for the sake of him she loved.  And verily she had her reward.

When the sun rose, there only remained a black and ugly pit to mark the place where Deacon Fletcher’s house had stood.

And of all its inmates, only Jason—­carefully watched and tended at the house of Peter Hopkins—­was left to tell the tale of that night’s tragedy.  And he, poor fellow, had no tale to tell, the delirium of fever having been upon him all the night.  It was very doubtful if he would recover,—­more than doubtful.  Not one in a thousand could do so, with such an exposure at the critical period of his sickness.