“Come,” said Onslow, taking the girl by the hand, “we must run for it.” And he led the way beachwards, blundering through piled up mounds of wreckage, whilst the stinging spindrift swirled around their heads and bit them upon the face like whips. But a flying missile from out of the inky blackness struck him on the curve of the temple before he had gone with her twenty yards, and the grip of his fingers loosened, and he swayed and fell without a word. The girl threw herself on his body, wailing that he was killed and that she too would stay there and die; but a wild hope seized her that he might be only stunned, and she took his body in her arms, and half dragging, half carrying, began to go with him once more by tedious inches towards the beach. Then the cyclone burst out afresh with all the torrent of its fury, and to move or even stand against the wind was a thing impossible. The girl and her burden were flung heavily to the ground, and a mass of driving wreckage slid above them and pressed them down. “Oh, Pat, Pat,” she cried, “I did so want to live with you, and now we must both die here.” Three terrible hours more they spent there, the girl expecting violent death to fall on her every next second, the man in her arms gradually returning to consciousness. And then, like an organ whose wind-chamber has emptied itself, the cyclone suddenly dropped its voice. It had arisen in a minute to the full of its strength, and in a single minute it lulled to a breathless calm, leaving the air scoured and sweet, and the land a tangled desert. The sea alone remembered its lashing actively, and fumed in a swell of sullen majesty in its deeper parts, and sent its angry waters back in rippling surf on to those shallow western beaches from which it had been so ruthlessly evicted. It was from this last returning tidal wave that the final danger came, but the two under that pile of wreckage managed to slip from beneath the wood when the waters loosened it, and run in the breaking dawn to the higher ground beyond. They were bruised, both of them, and Onslow was bleeding from a jagged cut on the head; but after all, their hurts were trifling compared with what they might have been. Three thousand people died in that night’s work amongst the Southern States; and the air was torn with the moan of those who were left, lamenting as they sought their dead.