She put her lips to his ear. “Do you think we shall come out of it alive, Pat? Tell me honestly.” “I hope so.” “Honestly, Pat.” “I’m afraid, darling, it’s a poor chance.” Her soft, wet cheek nestled against him, and strands of her hair intertwined themselves with his. “Pat,” she said, “you never knew, but I loved you all along from the first.” * * * * * Then, for the first time during many years, Patrick Onslow knew what it was to fear death. Before-time life had held many torments for him, and if lead or water or steel chose to show him the Great Secret, he did not very much care. Now it was all different. He lusted to live with a fierceness which almost drove him mad. “You are trembling,” the girl said anxiously. “I know I am. You have made me a rank coward, dear.” She understood him, and kissed his mouth; but no other words passed between them. The cyclone blew on, bellowing and tearing, and the fiends’ fingers of the wind did mischief beyond all reckoning. Timber which had stood hundreds of years, ceibas and cypresses, live oaks and pines, sprawled down amongst the tangled undergrowth, mere masses of splintered matchwood. The mangrove thickets were clogged with stones, with grasses, with gray tangles of Spanish moss. Lakes were licked from their beds and spirted far over the creaming waters of the Gulf. The land birds were driven like helpless spume-flakes far away to sea, and choked with the gale before they were flung breathless from its clutches. The palmetto-shucks of the humbler coast-dwellers vanished in dust. The frame houses of the better-to-do burst at all their angles, and spread like platforms upon the ground. And meanwhile the great straggling, wooden hotel on Point Sebastian dissolved away like a sandbank in a flooded estuary. First the heat-twisted shingles had been stripped off, flying away into the wind like some strange dark fowl sent as _avant-couriers_ of more fearsome things to come. Then weather-boards followed, singly and in coveys; then gable-ends and joists and rafters; all floating and pitching in the air as though the wind had the density of a tossing ocean stream. Chairs and wooden bedsteads, clothes blown out into grotesque shapes, as though the freakish spirits of the storm had donned them, the scantling of the long piazzas, and still more boards, whirred out into the night and vanished for ever down the track of the cyclone. And in the thick of this devil’s bombardment crouched men and women, and other things, shapeless and horrible, which had been men and women once. The tale of the dead grew with awful pace that night. Once there was a slight lull in the blast of the gale, and the driven-out waters of the shore began to return, and swirled knee-high about the two who were taking refuge at the foot of the pile.