he wind whistled about their ears.

"Just to visit yer, that's all. 'Cause I've taken a fancy to yer." The
Captain chuckled and had vanished...

Jeremy flung one glance at the grey desolate road behind him, then ran
for his life to join the others.

What, after that, did he expect? He did not know. Only the Captain was
drawing closer, and closer, and closer.

He could feel now always his hot breath upon his ear. Two days after the
whispered dialogue in the road, that first promise of spring broke down
into a tempest of wind and rain. The Coles' house in Orange Street,
although it looked, with its stout, white stone, strong enough, was old
and shaky. Now, in the storm, it shook and wheezed and rattled in every
one of its joints. Jeremy, at ordinary times, loved the sound of the
wind about the house, when he himself was safe and warm and cosy; but
this was now another affair. Lying in his bed he could hear the screams
down the chimney, then the tug at his window-pane, the rattling
clutch upon the wood, then the sweep under the bed and the rush up the
wallpaper, until at last, from behind some badly defended spot where the
paper was thin, there would come a wailing, whistling screech as though
someone were being murdered in the next room. On other days Jeremy, when
he heard this screech, shivered with a cosy, creeping thrill; but now he
put his head under the bedclothes, shut his eyes very tight, and tried
not to see the Captain with his ugly nose and tiny gimlet eyes.

He would be half asleep.

"Come," said the Captain from the window, "the boat is waiting! You
promised, you know. Come just as you are--no time to dress," and poor
Jeremy would feel the great, heavy hand upon his shoulder and wake
shivering and shaking from head to foot.

On the third day following his last interview with the Captain he went
to bed a little reassured and comforted. Perhaps the Captain had gone
away. For three days he had seen and heard nothing of him at all.

That was a night of rain--rain that slashed and whipped the house as
though it would batter it to the ground. The rain would come with a
wild fury upon the panes, trembling with its excited anger, would crash
against the glass, then fall back and hang waiting for a further attack;
next the results of the first attack would slip and slide like the
crawling of a thousand snakes, then fall and drop slowly and heavily
as though every drop were foretelling some awful peril. Jeremy l