Together they passed the level of the grand stand. This huge erection of white-painted wood provided the only constant landmark, for Edwin was not tall enough to see above the shoulders of the adult crowd in which he was moving. Now they had left the grand stand behind it seemed that they must surely be crossing the course. And then a bell clanged and the crowd parted like a great wave of the Red Sea in pictures of the Exodus. Edwin found himself clinging to the coat-tails of his friend, and the little man, in turn, hanging on, as if for his life, to a whitewashed post from which the next wave would have sucked him back. The crowd swayed gently, settling down and leaving them stranded upon the very edge of the course. “That’s a trick worth knowing,” said Edwin’s friend. Opposite them the stands, well known to him on Sunday walks as a vast skeletal erection, stood clothed in flesh and blood: tier upon tier of human faces packed one above the other looked down on him. Edwin had never before realised how pale the faces of men and women were. From the midst of them there rose a ceaseless murmur of human speech, shrilling occasionally like the voices of starlings when they whirl above an autumn reed bed, and then, as suddenly, still. For one extraordinary moment they were nearly silent. “They’re off!” said the little man. . . . Again the murmur of the stands arose. A bookie just behind them was doing his best to get in a last few bets, entreating, proclaiming passionately the virtues of “the old firm.” His red face lifted above the crowd, and while he shouted saliva dribbled from his mouth. A curious roaring sound came from the other side of the horse-shoe course a mile or more away. He stopped with his mouth open in the middle of a sentence. Something had happened over there. Everybody, even those who couldn’t see anything, turned in the direction from which the sound came. Edwin turned with them. He couldn’t imagine why. And when he turned his eyes gazed straight into those of Miss Denning, the matron of the College Sanatorium, marvellously dressed for the occasion and leaning upon the innocent arm of Mr. Heal. Thank God, Mr. Heal was short-sighted! Edwin felt himself blushing. He knew for certain that she had seen and recognised him; for his sick headaches had often taken him to the Sanatorium and he had always been rather a favourite of hers. She stared straight at him and her eyes never wavered. Obviously the game was up. He fancied that her lips smiled faintly. Never was a smile more sinister.