Then he called to the new-comer, with his face to the porch door, and the answer came back to him in a wail like the wind itself. “Who's there?” It was Joney from the glen. “We're like herrings in a barrel--we can't let you in.” She wasn't wanting to come in. But her roof was going stripping, and half her house was felled, and she couldn't get her son (the idiot boy) to leave his bed. He would perish; he would die; he was all the family she had left to her--wouldn't the master come and save him? “Impossible!” shouted Cæsar. “We've our own missing this fearful night, Joney, and the Lord will protect His children.” Was it Kate? She had seen her in the glen---- “Let me get at that door,” said Pete. “But the house will come down,” cried Cæsar. “Let it come,” said Pete. Pete shut the door of the bar-room, and then the wind was heard to swirl through the porch. “When did you see her, Joney, and where?” said the voice of Pete; and the voice of Joney answered him-- “Goings by my own house at the start of the storm this everin.” “I'll come with you--go on,” said Pete, and Grannie shouted across the bar-- “Take Cæsar's topcoat over your monkey-jacket.” “I've sail enough already for a wind like this, mother,” cried the voice of Pete, and then the swirling sound in the porch went off with a long-drawn whirr, and Cæsar came back alone to the kitchen. Pete's wound ached again, but he pressed his hand on the place of it and struggled up the glen, dragging Joney behind him. They came to her house at last. One half of the thatch lay over the other half; the rafters were bare like the ribs of the wreck; the oat-cake peck was rattling on the lath; the meal-barrel in the corner was stripped of its lid, and the meal was whirling into the air like a waterspout; the dresser was stripped, the broken crockery lay on the uncovered floor, and the iron slowrie hanging over the place of the fire was swinging and striking against the wall, and ringing like a knell. And in the midst of this scene of desolation the idiot boy was placidly sleeping on his naked bed, and over it the moon was scudding through a tattered sky. The night wore on, and the company in the kitchen listened long, and sometimes heard sounds as of voices crying in the wind, but Pete did not return. Then they fell to groaning again, to praying aloud without fear, and to confessing their undiscovered sins without shame. “I'm searched terrible--I can see through me,” cried Kelly, the postman. Some were chiefly troubled lest death should fall on them while they were in a public-house. “I keep none,” cried Cæsar. “But you wouldn't let us open the door,” whined the farmer. If the door had been wide enough for a Bishop, not a soul would have stirred. For the first time within anyone's recollection, Nancy Joe was on her knees.