Presently we heard unaccustomed sounds in the hall. The tramping and scraping of heavy feet. We looked over the banisters and saw a man being carried in by Kleiner Klaus and our gardener. The man's clothes were wet, so were his face and hair. It was Colonel Dover, staring with fixed, reproachful eyes at the lady of Duncombe House. And my mother, with a look I had never seen on her face, stood holding open the drawing-room door for the bearers to pass. Their feet left muddy marks in the hall.... We did not go downstairs till late that afternoon, when the body had been taken away. People said the steel ferule of the umbrella had attracted the electric current. I knew God had heard my prayer. But in striking down my enemy he had struck the chestnut-tree. It was riven from foot to crotch. That was the day I had in mind when I excused my laboured playing: "You expect me to be as quick as God." CHAPTER IV NIMBUS I see I have given the impression that Colonel Dover was the cloud. No. He was only a roll of thunder behind the cloud. I have put off saying more about the cloud because of the difficulty in making anyone else understand the larger, vaguer threat on our horizon. Those early days, as I have said, were happy and warmly sheltered. Yet there was all about us, or hovering near ready to swoop down, a sense of fear. I hardly know how we came first to feel it as a factor in life. A thousand impressions stamped the consciousness deep and deeper still. A fear, older than the fear of Colonel Dover, and apart from any danger with a name. A thing as close to life as the flesh to our bones. We were safe there, on our island in the heathery sea, only as people are safe who never trust themselves to the treachery of ships. My mother seemed to hug the thought of home as those in old days who heard a wolf howl gave thanks for the stout stockade. More times than I can count I have seen her coming home from one of our walks with that look, half dreaming, half vague apprehension. I have seen her turn that look back on Bettina, lagging: "Soon home, now, little girl. Soon safe in our dear home." I remember the look of the heath, at dusk, on winter days. The forbidding grey of the sky. The clammy chill. A white fog coming out of the hollows--a level mist; not rising high at first, but rolling nearer, nearer, like the ghost of an inundating sea. All the familiar things taking on an unreal look. A silence, and a shivering. Sometimes the dull oppression broken by a birds' note. Harsh and sudden. A danger signal. I see us linking arms and, with our mother between us, so mend the pace that she would reach home almost breathless. Nevertheless, we would hurry indoors and shoot the bolt behind us like people who knew themselves pursued.