With these words, she started from the room, darting up a narrow stairway
leading from one end of the kitchen to the upper regions.

"What are you going to do?" shouted Jess, her voice shaky with alarm.

"Save that child if I can," flung back Peggy, plunging bravely up the
smoke-laden stairway.

In the unfamiliar house, and half blinded and choked by smoke and
sulphurous fumes, Peggy had a hard task before her. But she pluckily
plunged forward, feeling her way by the walls, and keeping her head low,
where the smoke was not so thick. As she reached what she deemed was the
top of the staircase, she thought she heard a tiny voice crying out in
alarm.

Following the direction of the sounds, she staggered along a hallway and
then reeled into an open door. The smoke was not so thick in the room, but
its fumes were heavy enough. In a crib in one corner lay a child of about
two years of age. Its rose-leaf of a face was wrinkled up in its efforts
to make its terrified little voice heard.

Peggy darted upon it and hugged it close to her. Then, with renewed
courage, she started to make her way back again. But more smoke than ever
was rolling along the passage, and it was a hard task.

"I must do it--I must," Peggy kept saying to herself, clinging the while
to the terrified child.

But at the head of the staircase the conditions appalled her. The smoke