"I will give him half an hour more," says the watcher to himself, "and then I will turn in." Of this allotted half-hour only five minutes are yet left to run, when, in a lull in the hurricane, the sound which Jim's hearing has been so long stretched to catch--the sound of wheels on the gravel--is at length audible. During the last two hours he has heard many phantom wheels--many of those ghostly coaches that the wind drives shrieking through the winter nights. But these are real ones. Before the drowsy porter, nodding in his little den, can reach the hall-door, Jim has opened it--opened it just in time to admit a man who, his pace still further accelerated by the mighty hands of the pushing blast, is bounding up the steps. If any doubt as to this person's identity lingered in Jim's mind, his first words would dispel it. "She is here? There is no mistake? She is here?" "How late you are!" cries the other, apparently regarding the new arrival's utterance more as an ejaculation than as a question expecting or needing an answer. "Why are you so late? Did the engines break down?" "She is here?" repeats Byng insistently, taking no notice of the queries addressed to him. "You have not deceived me? For mercy's sake say that you have not deceived me!" "Why should I deceive you?" rejoins Jim impatiently. "Yes; certainly she is here." They are in the hall by now--the hall which, the Grand Hotel being gasless, is lit by only one weak paraffin lamp, which the gust from the door, necessarily still open to admit of the carrying in of the traveller's bags and rugs, is making even more faint and flickering than its wont. "You must have had a fine tossing!" "I believe you; they all thought we were going to make a dinner for the fishes--ha, ha! All but I. I knew better. I knew that I could not come to grief when _she_ had called me to her." Byng's hat is rammed down over his brows, and his fur coat turned up so high round his ears that it is impossible in the obscurity to see his face; but there is something in the tone of his voice--a loud, wild rollicking--that makes the idea cross Jim's mind that he has been drinking. What a shock it will give to Elizabeth if, in her covert vigil--he has no more doubt that she has been watching than that he has been doing so himself--she overhears that thick, raised voice! Prompted by this thought, he says hastily: "Come into the dining-room. I told them to put something to eat for you there." Byng complies; and when they have reached the empty _salle à manger_, whose whitewash looks weird and unnatural in the chill of the night, he sends his hat skimming down one of the long tables, and, grasping both Jim's hands in his, cries out, in the same loud tone of intoxicated triumph: