to its
tracks, and lay there foundered, rattling in the throat.

By this time the foremost of the drove came abreast the house front,
where Sir Charles Verity's three ground-floor rooms, with the corridor
behind them, ranged out from the main building. The many-paned
semicircular windows of these rooms dimly glistened, below their
fan-shaped, slated roofs. The crowding scurry of scared, over-driven
animals was so indisputable that Damaris expected a universal smashing of
glass. But the sound of many hoofs, still muted by sliding sand, passed
straight on into and through the house as though no obstacle intervened
barring progress.

The many-paned windows remained intact, undemolished, dimly glistening
beneath their slated roofs. The garden stretched vacant, as before, right
away to the battery, in the elusive twilight, a sky of smoked
crystal--through which stars began to show faintly, points of cold
blurred light--above the gloom of the ilex trees to the west, and in the
south, above the indistinguishable sea, the slender moon hanging upright,
silver and sickle-shaped.

Thus far Damaris' entire consciousness had resided in and been limited to
her auditory sense; concentration being too absorbed and intense to allow
room for reasoning, still less for scepticism or even astonishment. She
had watched with her ears--as the blind watch--desperate to interpret,
instant by instant, inch by inch, this reconstructed tragedy of long-dead
man and long-dead beast. There had been no thinking round the central
interest, no attempted reading of its bearing upon normal events. Mind
and imagination were fascinated by it to the exclusion of all else. It
acted as an extravagant dream acts, abrogating all known laws of cause
and effect, giving logic and science the lie, negativing probability,
making the untrue true, the impossible convincingly manifest.

Not, indeed, until she beheld Mary Fisher, deep-bosomed and comely, in
black gown, white apron and cap, moving within those rooms
downstairs--still echoing, as they surely must, to that tumultuous and
rather ghastly equine transit--did the extraordinary character of the
occurrence flash into fullness of relief.

Mary, meanwhile, set down her flat candlestick upon the big writing-table
in Sir Charles's study, lighted lamps and drew blinds and curtains. Went
into the bedroom next door and dressing-room beyond, methodically
performing the evening ritual of "shutting up." Her shadow marc