Already little flames were dancing up from the shingles, where firebrands had fallen, their number increasing with each second.

So Vanrevel raised his arms, took a hard grip upon the lowest rung of the grappling-ladder and tried it with his weight; the iron hooks bit deeper into the roof; they held.

He swung himself out into the air with nothing beneath him, caught the rung under his knee, and for a moment hung there while the crowd withheld from breathing; then a cloud of smoke, swirling that way, made him the mere ghostly nucleus of himself, blotted him out altogether, and, as it rose slowly upward, showed the ladder free and empty, so that at first there was an instant when they thought that he had fallen.

But, as the smoke cleared, there was the tall figure on the roof.
It was an agile and daring thing to do, and the man who did it was mightily applauded.

The cheering bothered him, however, for he was trying to make them understand, below, what would happen to the "Engine Company" in case the water was not sent through the lines directly; and what he said should be done to the engineers included things that would have blanched the cheek of the most inventive Spanish Inquisitor that ever lived.
Miss Betty made a gesture as if to a person within whispering distance.
"Your coat is on fire," she said in an ordinary conversational tone, without knowing she had spoken aloud, and Mr.Vanrevel, more than one hundred feet away, seemed particularly conscious of the pertinence of her remark.