“Come out and have a look!” he suggested, opening the door and offering a hand, and presently they were standing in the ring of light, caught in the deafening blare of the full orchestrion overhead. Some of the farmers had stayed for a final flourish to the day’s festivity. Denny was mounted on a tiger, with his brother’s little girl in front of him, and one of Braithwaite’s pleasing daughters behind. The big cattle-dealer was perched on an inadequate ostrich, with a scared wife clinging to the neck of a giraffe. The shy ploughman rode solemnly alone in the red-plush sumptuousness of a car. The blaze of brightness scooped out of the pressing dark gave the whole scene a curiously unreal effect, so that, watching the mechanical rise and fall of the flying circle, Lanty’s mind, reacting from the strain of the three days’ audit, grew gradually quiescent and dazed. Dandy spoke to him, but he did not hear her. Close at hand in the crowd, Brack had turned to face him, but he did not see him. The lights dimmed suddenly, became lanterns swinging and dipping in a night as dark as hell. The blare of the trumpets was the shattering roar of a big wind as it tore the air to tatters, and the wailing of the reeds grew into the shrieks of women and the thin crying of lambs. He was conscious of intense, paralysing fear, of a frantic necessity to shout, choked on his lips by the pressure of the gale. And through it all he felt that he was listening, straining his ears to madness against the tumult of an inferno let loose, just as, at Ninekyrkes, he had seen an old woman strain and reach through the tense stillness of coming thunder. The deadly helplessness of nightmare weighed him down as he writhed against the horror, certain that, if he could speak _now_, hear _now_, the unthinkable danger would pass. Through the torture a hand came up on to his, a hand that he had never touched before to recognise, but which held and drew him up and out of the abyss. He thought vaguely that it must be Hamer’s--the clasp had the same comfort--but when he had struggled blindly back to the present, he found it was not Hamer’s, but his daughter’s. He saw Brack, then, his eyes, as they rested on him, unnaturally brilliant, the pupils unnaturally large, before he dropped his still swaying gaze to Dandy’s face. “What was it?” he asked. “I heard--water!” and as he said it he caught a little click in a man’s throat, as of satisfaction and justification, but when he looked again, Brack was gone. Dandy drew him out of the crowd. “You looked as if you had gone blind!” she said. “I was frightened, and you trembled as if you were frightened, too. And you called first to your own father and then to mine, just as though you were drowning and wanted help. I expect you’re tired out, and ought to rest. Let me take you home in the car. You can send over for your horse to-morrow.” But he refused. He wanted the quiet ride home in the night for thought.