With the beating of the horses' hoofs the cloak gradually dropped from her eyes, so that Kate could discern dark hedge-rows and occasional trees drifting like smoke behind them as they rode. The lightning played about in front, dividing land and sky with its vivid pale-blue line. Then the thunder went roaring and galloping athwart the universe, and lo! on the back of that, the black and starless canopy shut down blacker than ever. Once through the folds of the cloak Kate saw a field of flowers, all growing neatly together in squares, lit up by the lightning. Every parallelogram stood clear as on a chess-board. But the color was wholly gone out of them, all being subdued to a ghastly pallor by the fierce brilliance of the zigzag flame. To the dazed and terrified girl hours seemed to pass, and still the horses did not stop. At last Kate could feel, by the uneven falling of the hoofs and by the slower pace of the beasts, that they had reached rougher country, where the roads were less densely compacted than in the neighborhood of the traffic of a city. Then, after a little, the iron of the horseshoes grated sharply on the pebbles of the sea-shore. Men's voices cried harshly back and forth, lanterns flashed, snorting horses checked themselves, spraying the pebbles every way from their forefeet--and presently Kate felt herself being lifted down from the saddle. So stiff was she with the constraint of her position that, but for the support of the man who helped her down, she would have fallen among the stones. The lightning still gleamed fitfully along the horizon. The wind was blowing off shore, but steadily and with a level persistence which one might lean against. The wild gustiness of the first burst of the storm had passed away, and as the pale lightning flared up along the rough edges of the sea, which appeared to rise above her like a wall, Kate could momentarily see the slanting masts of a small vessel lying-to just outside the bar, her bowsprit pointing this way and that, as she heaved and labored in the swell. "You are monstrously late!" a voice exclaimed, in English, and a dark figure stood between them and the white tops of the nearer waves. Kate's conductor grunted surlily, but made no audible reply. The man in whose arms she had travelled, as in bands of iron, now dismounted and began to swear at the speaker in strange, guttural, unintelligible oaths. "We are here to wait for my lord!" cried the man who had lifted Kate from the saddle. He stood by her, still holding her arm securely. His voice had a curious metallic ring in it, and an odd upward intonation at the close of a sentence which remained in the memory.