"You are free to go.
You, your Highness, and Miss Thorne, will accompany me."
He held open the door and there was almost a scramble to get out. The
prince and Miss Thorne waited until the last.
"And, Miss Thorne, if you will give us a lift in your car?" Mr. Grimm
suggested. "It is now four minutes of three."
The automobile came in answer to a signal and the three in silence
entered it. The car trembled and had just begun to move when Mr. Grimm
remembered something, and leaped out.
"Wait for me!" he called. "There's a man locked in the coal-bin!"
He disappeared into the house, and Miss Thorne, with a gasp of horror
sank back in her seat with face like chalk. The prince glanced uneasily
at his watch, then spoke curtly to the chauffeur.
"Run the car up out of danger; there'll be an explosion there in a
moment."
They had gone perhaps a hundred feet when the building they had just
left seemed to be lifted bodily from the ground by a great spurt of
flame which tore through its center, then collapsed like a thing of
cards. The prince, unmoved, glanced around at Miss Thorne; she lay in a
dead faint beside him.
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