Once embarked on these reflections I could not again close my eyes, and lay awake for the remaining hours of the night with as great a din going on as ever I heard in my life. I have described this--the effect of heavy rain when you are in a caravan--in that portion of the narrative dealing with the night on Grip’s Common, so need only repeat that it resembles nothing so much as a sharp pelting with unusually hard stones. Edelgard, if she did indeed sleep, must be of an almost terrifying toughness, for the roof on which this pelting was going on was but a few inches from her head. As the cold dawn crept in between the folds of our window-curtains and the noise had in no way abated, I began very seriously to wonder how I could possibly get up and go out and eat breakfast under such conditions. There was my mackintosh, and I also had galoshes, but I could not appear before Frau von Eckthum in the sponge bag, and yet that was the only sensible covering for my head. But what after all could galoshes avail in such a flood? The stubble field, I felt, could be nothing by then but a lake; no fire could live in it; no stove but would be swamped. Were it not better, if such was to be the weather, to return to London, take rooms in some water-tight boarding-house, and frequent the dryness of museums? Of course it would be better. Better? Must not anything in the world be better than that which is the worst? But, alas, I had been made to pay beforehand for the Elsa, and had taken the entire responsibility for her and her horse’s safe return and even if I could bring myself to throw away such a sum as I had disbursed one cannot leave a caravan lying about as though it were what our neighbours across the Vosges call a mere bagatelle. It is not a bagatelle. On the contrary, it is a huge and complicated mechanism that must go with you like the shell on the poor snail’s back wherever you go. There is no escape from it, once you have started, day or night. Where was Panthers by now, Panthers with its kind and helpful little lady? Heaven alone knew, after all our zigzagging. Find it by myself I certainly could not, for not only had we zigzagged in obedience to the caprices of Mrs. Menzies-Legh, but I had walked most of the time as a man in a dream, heeding nothing particularly except my growing desire to sit down.