It was the deep suspense of Cumberland which made him so silently alert.  He was as intensely alive as the receiver of a wireless apparatus; he gathered information from the empty air.

So that Byrne was hardly surprised, when, in the midst of that grim silence, the old man raised a rigid forefinger of warning.  Kate and Daniels stiffened in their chairs and Byrne felt his flesh creep.  Of course it was nothing.  The wind, which had shaken the house with several strong gusts before dinner, had now grown stronger and blew with steadily increasing violence; perhaps the sad old man had been attracted by the mournful chorus and imagined some sound he knew within it.

But now once more the finger was raised, the arm extended, shaking violently, and Joe Cumberland turned upon them a glance which flashed with a delirious and unhealthy joy.

“Listen!” he cried.  “Again!”

“What?” asked Kate.

“I hear them, I tell you.”

Her lips blanched, and parted to speak, but she checked the impulse and looked swiftly about the room with what seemed to Byrne an appeal for help.  As for Buck Daniels, he changed from a dark bronze to an unhealthy yellow; fear, plain and grimly unmistakable, was in his face.  Then he strode to the window and threw it open with a crash.  The wind leaped in and tossed the flame in the throat of the chimney, so that great shadows waved suddenly through the room, and made the chairs seem afloat.  Even the people were suddenly unreal.  And the rush of the storm gave Byrne an eerie sensation of being blown through infinite space.  For a moment there was only the sound of the gale and the flapping of a loose picture against the wall, and the rattling of a newspaper.  Then he heard it.

First it was a single note which he could not place.  It was music, and yet it was discordant, and it had the effect of a blast of icy wind.

Once he had been in Egypt and had stood in a corridor of Cheops’ pyramid.  The torch had been blown out in the hand of his guide.  From somewhere in the black depths before them came a laugh, made unhuman by echoes.  And Byrne had visioned the mummied dead pushing back the granite lids of their sarcophagi and sitting upright.

But that was nothing compared with this.  Not half so wild or strange.

He listened again, breathless, with the sharp prickling running up and down his spine.  It was the honking of the wild geese, flying north.  And out of the sound he builded a picture of the grey triangle cleaving through the cold upper sky, sent on a mission no man could understand.

“Was I right?  Was I right?” shrilled the invalid, and when Byrne turned towards him, he saw the old man sitting erect, with an expression of wild triumph.  There came an indescribable cry from the girl, and a deep throated curse from Buck Daniels as he slammed down the window.