Cook, enveloped in a cloak, stood out on the second landing, while Mr Ullman and the ladies invaded her chamber.  The noise of myowling was terrible.  Mr Ullman opened the dormer window, and the rain burst in, together with a fury of myowling.  But he did not care.  It lightened and thundered.  But he did not care.  He procured a chair of cook’s and put it under the window and stood on it, with his back to the window, and twisted forth his body so that he could spy up the roof.  The ladies protested that he would be wet through, but he paid no heed to them.

Then his head, dripping, returned into the room.  “I’ve just seen by a flash of lightning,” he said in a voice of emotion.  “The poor animal has got his tail fast in the socket of the weather-vane.  He must have been whisking it about up there, and the vane turned and caught it.  The vane is jammed.”

“How dreadful!” said Mrs Ebag.  “Whatever can be done?”

“He’ll be dead before morning,” sobbed Miss Ebag.

“I shall climb up the roof and release him,” said Carl Ullman, gravely.

They forbade him to do so.  Then they implored him to refrain.  But he was adamant.  And in their supplications there was a note of insincerity, for their hearts bled for Goldie, and, further, they were not altogether unwilling that Carl should prove himself a hero.  And so, amid apprehensive feminine cries of the acuteness of his danger, Carl crawled out of the window and faced the thunder, the lightning, the rain, the slippery roof, and the maddened cat.  A group of three servants were huddled outside the attic door.

In the attic the ladies could hear his movements on the roof, moving higher and higher.  The suspense was extreme.  Then there was silence; even the myowling had ceased.  Then a clap of thunder; and then, after that, a terrific clatter on the roof, a bounding downwards as of a great stone, a curse, a horrid pause, and finally a terrific smashing of foliage and cracking of wood.

Mrs Ebag sprang to the window.

“It’s all right,” came a calm, gloomy voice from below.  “I fell into the rhododendrons, and Goldie followed me.  I’m not hurt, thank goodness!  Just my luck!”

A bell rang imperiously.  It was the paralytic’s bell.  He had been disturbed by these unaccustomed phenomena.

“Sister, do go to father at once,” said Mrs Ebag, as they both hastened downstairs in a state of emotion, assuredly unique in their lives.

V

Mrs Ebag met Carl and the cat as they dripped into the gas-lit drawing-room.  They presented a surprising spectacle, and they were doing damage to the Persian carpet at the rate of about five shillings a second; but that Carl, and the beloved creature for whom he had dared so much, were equally unhurt appeared to be indubitable.  Of course, it was a miracle.  It could not be regarded as other than a miracle.  Mrs Ebag gave vent to an exclamation in which were mingled pity, pride, admiration and solicitude, and then remained, as it were, spellbound.  The cat escaped from those protecting arms and fled away.  Instead of following Goldie, Mrs Ebag continued to gaze at the hero.