The car went back as rooks go home on a slanting gale. More than once Brack felt her slide up and off the bank, on the other side of which lay the waiting sands. And, as they fled, with the tempest-roar in their ears, above it and behind them they heard the voice of the coming tide. * * * * * Over the telephone, Hamer had offered to motor Lancaster to the “Duke,” and the latter had accepted, adding that he would walk to Watters by the short cut. Driving home from Witham, his mind had been so deep in ruts of law that he scarcely noticed the increasing violence of the sinking day, but when he left the house again about seven o’clock he was appalled by its gathered strength. He wished now that he had asked Hamer to send the car round, but the Lane would soon take him, and he would be sheltered under the tall hedges. Knowing the road so well, he carried no light, and consequently stumbled into Dandy in the pelting dark, feeling her way home in a state of abject misery. To his astonished questioning she made answer in a voice very close on tears, and she was more than a little cross. She had had a trying experience, and even her beautiful temper had snapped under the strain. “I’ve been losing myself!” she explained, conscious of sopping boots, clinging skirts, rat-tail hair and tingling fingers, from which she had long since cast away ruined gloves. He could not see her here, but he would certainly see her in the hall at Watters, and though, out of all heaven and earth and any other stray universe, he was the one and only person she wanted, she naturally used him as the whipping-boy of her pent-up wrath and distress.