And on the verandah, as I arrived breathless, and shaken in my soul, Frances and Mabel, standing by the tea-table, looked up to greet me. In the faces of both were clearly legible the signs of shock. They watched me coming, yet so full of their own distress that they hardly noticed the state in which I came. In the face of my hostess, however, I read another and a bigger thing than in the face of Frances. Mabel _knew_. She had experienced what I had experienced. She had heard that awful sentence I had heard, but heard it not for the first time; heard it, moreover, I verily believe, complete and to its dreadful end. ‘Bill, did you hear that curious noise just now?’ Frances asked it sharply before I could say a word. Her manner was confused; she looked straight at me; and there was a tremor in her voice she could not hide. ‘There’s wind about,’ I said, ‘wind in the trees and sweeping round the walls. It’s risen rather suddenly.’ My voice faltered rather. ‘No. It wasn’t wind,’ she insisted, with a significance meant for me alone, but badly hidden. ‘It was more like distant thunder, we thought. How you ran too!’ she added. ‘What a pace you came across the terraces!’ I knew instantly from the way she said it that they both had already heard the sound before and were anxious to know if I had heard it, and how. My interpretation was what they sought. ‘It was a curiously deep sound, I admit. It may have been big guns at sea,’ I suggested, ‘forts or cruisers practising. The coast isn’t so very far, and with the wind in the right direction----’ The expression on Mabel’s face stopped me dead. ‘Like huge doors closing,’ she said softly in her colourless voice, ‘enormous metal doors shutting against a mass of people clamouring to get out.’ The gravity, the note of hopelessness in her tones, was shocking. Frances had gone into the house the instant Mabel began to speak. ‘I’m cold,’ she had said; ‘I think I’ll get a shawl.’ Mabel and I were alone. I believe it was the first time we had been really alone since I arrived. She looked up from the teacups, fixing her pallid eyes on mine. She had made a question of the sentence. ‘You hear it like that?’ I asked innocently. I purposely used the present tense. She changed her stare from one eye to the other; it was absolutely expressionless. My sister’s step sounded on the floor of the room behind us. ‘If only----’ Mabel began, then stopped, and my own feelings leaping out instinctively completed the sentence I felt was in her mind: ‘----something would happen.’ She instantly corrected me. I had caught her thought, yet somehow phrased it wrongly. ‘We could escape!’ She lowered her tone a little, saying it hurriedly. The ‘we’ amazed and horrified me; but something in her voice and manner struck me utterly dumb. There was ice and terror in it. It was a dying woman speaking--a lost and hopeless soul.