Far away, through the hush that covered the world, that ‘something’ was astir—coming swiftly nearer. He stepped back into the middle of the room and waited. Smoke, the sleeping black cat on the sofa, sat up and waited too. Looking about it with brilliant green eyes, wide open, and whiskers twitching backwards and forwards, it understood even better than he did that a change in all that world of darkness had come to pass. The animal stared alternately at the window and the door. For another minute the stillness held supreme. Then, from the silent reaches beyond, this new sound came suddenly close, dropping down through leagues of night. It began with a faint roar in the chimney; a tree outside uttered a soft, rushing cry; a thousand leaves, instead of one, rattled on the wall. A Messenger, running headlong through the darkness, was calling aloud a warning as it ran, for all to understand who could. And, among the few who were awake and understood, Paul and his four-footed companion were certainly the first. A sudden movement of the vast fabric of darkness came next. That scaffolding of shadows trembled, as though the same moment it would fall and let in—Light. In front of the bow window the muslin curtain that so long had hung motionless, now bellied out slowly into the room. The movement, mysterious and suggestive, claimed attention significantly. Paul and Smoke, watching it, exchanged glances. Then, with a long, sighing sound, it floated back again to its original position. It hung down straight and still as before. But in that moment something had entered the room. Borne by this messenger of the coming storm, this stray Wind had left its warning—and was gone! Smoke leapt softly down and padded over to sniff the curtain, and having done so, blinked up at Paul with eloquent eyes, and sat back to wait and—wash! No apparatus of speech ever said more plainly ‘Look out! Something’s coming! Better be prepared as I am!’ And something did come—almost the same minute. The forces that had so long been trying to upset the tent of darkness, did upset it, and from one uplifted corner there rushed down upon the world a blue-white sheet of light that was utterly gorgeous. For one instant trees, moor, hill leaped into vivid outline. The hands that held the sheet of brilliance shook it from the four corners, and all the sky shook with it; and, immediately after, the scaffolding of night fell with a prodigious crash, as the true storm, following upon its herald, descended with a hundred thunders and the roar of ten hundred trumpets.