Damaris listened to the silence, until her ears began to suspect its sincerity.  Sounds were there in plenty, she believed, were her hearing sharp enough to detect them.  They naughtily played hide-and-seek with her, striking a chord too deep or too thinly acute for human sense.  Sights were there too, had her eyes but a cat’s or an owl’s keener faculty of seeing.  Behind the tranquillity she apprehended movement and action employing a medium, obeying impulses, to us unknown.  Restfulness fled away, but, in place of it, interest grew.  If she concentrated her attention and listened more carefully, she should hear; looked more steadily, she should see.

Just because she was tired, a little shattered still and spent, did this predominance of outward nature draw her, imposing itself.  It beckoned her; and, through passing deficiency of will, she followed its beckoning, making no serious effort to resist.  With the consequence she presently did hear sounds, but sounds surely real and recognizable enough.

Coming from the shore eastwards, below the sea-wall along the river frontage, ponies walked, or rather floundered, fetlock deep in blown sand—­a whole drove of them to judge by the confused and muffled trampling of their many hoofs.  The drop from the top of the sea-wall to the beach was too great, and the space between the foot of the wall and the river-bank and breakwater too confined, for her to see the animals, even had not oncoming darkness rendered all objects increasingly ill-defined.

But the confused trampling instead of keeping along the foreshore, as in all reason it should, now came up and over the sea-wall, on to the battery, into the garden, heading towards the house, Damaris strained her eyes through the tranquil obscurity, seeking visible cause of this advancing commotion, but without effect.  Yet all the while, as her hearing clearly testified, the unseen ponies hustled one another, plunging, shying away from the swish and crack of a long-thonged whip.  One stumbled and rolled over in the sand.—­For although the mob was half-way up the lawn by now, the shuffling, sliding sand stayed always with them.—­After a nasty struggle it got on to its feet, tottering forward under savage blows, dead lame.  Another, a laggard, fell into 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.