Page:Cornelia Meigs--The Pool of Stars.djvu/104

 suddenly give way and carry him down out of her sight. She ran to the edge to see, squeezed through the cleft made by the collapse of the brick-heap and slid down after, to find David, a trifle scratched and with his red hair full of brick-dust, standing gazing about him with untroubled interest.

"This must have been the end of the house where the fire started," he commented. "See how much blacker the walls are and how even the bricks are burned. And look, that must be a part of one of the chimneys still left standing: you can see that the lightning struck it and split it to the very base. I wonder, with all the frost and rain since the fire, that it hasn't fallen long ago. I don't quite understand what this room is. It seems to have been away from the house and on a lower level."

Elizabeth balanced on the edge of a stone and looked at the confusion about her, where rusty heaps of metal and coils of wire lay amid the other rubbish.

"It must have been Mr. Reynolds' workshop," she suggested, "and see, even those steel bars are melted together. The fire must surely have been hottest just here."

"I believe you're right." David was picking his way about looking at the broken engine parts and the melted bits of steel. "I suppose he was working even then on that same invention. I think it