ign of life; but I narrowly escaped an
accident at the corner of the road to Pyrford, where a knot of people
stood with their backs to me. They said nothing to me as I passed. I
do not know what they knew of the things happening beyond the hill,
nor do I know if the silent houses I passed on my way were sleeping
securely, or deserted and empty, or harassed and watching against the
terror of the night.

From Ripley until I came through Pyrford I was in the valley of the
Wey, and the red glare was hidden from me. As I ascended the little
hill beyond Pyrford Church the glare came into view again, and the
trees about me shivered with the first intimation of the storm that
was upon me. Then I heard midnight pealing out from Pyrford Church
behind me, and then came the silhouette of Maybury Hill, with its
tree-tops and roofs black and sharp against the red.

Even as I beheld this a lurid green glare lit the road about me and
showed the distant woods towards Addlestone. I felt a tug at the
reins. I saw that the driving clouds had been pierced as it were by a
thread of green fire, suddenly lighting their confusion and falling
into the field to my left. It was the third falling star!

Close on its apparition, and blindingly violet by contrast, danced
out the first lightning of the gathering storm, and the thunder burst
like a rocket overhead. The horse took the bit between his teeth and
bolted.

A moderate incline runs towards the foot of Maybury Hill, and down
this we clattered. Once the lightning had begun, it went on in as
rapid a succession of flashes as I have ever seen. The thunderclaps,
treading one on the heels of another and with a strange crackling
accompaniment, sounded more like the working of a gigantic electric
machine than the usual detonating reverberations. The flickering
light was blinding and confusing, and a thin hail smote gustily at my
face as I drove down the slope.

At first I regarded little but the road before me, and then
abruptly my attention was arrested by something that was moving
rapidly down the opposite slope of Maybury Hill. At first I took it
for the wet roof of a house, but one flash following another showed it
to be in swift rolling movement. It was an elusive vision--a moment
of bewildering darkness, and then, in a flash like daylight, the red
masses of the Orphanage near the crest of the hill, the green tops of
the pine trees, and this problematical object came out clear