ys beneath, were beating--as pulses beat. And about her
blew something like a wind--a wind that was dismay.

Her eyes went to the face of the Marshal as a frightened child might
look towards its mother.

He was still serene. He was frowning slightly, she thought, but that
was natural enough, for the Earl of Delhi, with one hand gauntly
gesticulating, had taken him by the arm and was all too manifestly
disposed to drag him towards the great door that opened on the terrace.
And Viard was hurrying towards the huge windows and doing so in the
strangest of attitudes, bent forward and with eyes upturned.

Something up there?

And then it was as if thunder broke overhead.

The sound struck her like a blow. She crouched together against the
masonry and looked up. She saw three black shapes swooping down through
the torn clouds, and from a point a little below two of them, there had
already started curling trails of red....

Everything else in her being was paralysed, she hung through moments
that seemed infinities, watching those red missiles whirl down towards
her.

She felt torn out of the world. There was nothing else in the world but
a crimson-purple glare and sound, deafening, all-embracing, continuing
sound. Every other light had gone out about her and against this glare
hung slanting walls, pirouetting pillars, projecting fragments of
cornices, and a disorderly flight of huge angular sheets of glass. She
had an impression of a great ball of crimson-purple fire like a maddened
living thing that seemed to be whirling about very rapidly amidst
a chaos of falling masonry, that seemed to be attacking the earth
furiously, that seemed to be burrowing into it like a blazing rabbit....

She had all the sensations of waking up out of a dream.

She found she was lying face downward on a bank of mould and that a
little rivulet of hot water was running over one foot. She tried to
raise herself and found her leg was very painful. She was not clear
whether it was night or day nor where she was; she made a second effort,
wincing and groaning, and turned over and got into a sitting position
and looked about her.

Everything seemed very silent. She was, in fact, in the midst of a
vast uproar, but she did not realise this because her hearing had been
destroyed.

At first she could not join on what she saw to any previous experience.

She seemed to be in a strange world, a soundless, ruinous world, a
world of heaped broken th