‘Keep on the road!’ Midmore shouted.  The ditches were snorting bank-full on either side, and towards the brook-side the fields were afloat and beginning to move in the darkness.

‘Catch me going off it!  There’s his light burning all right.’  She halted undistressed at a little rise.  ‘But the flood’s in the orchard.  Look!’ She swung her lantern to show a front rank of old apple-trees reflected in still, out-lying waters beyond the half-drowned hedge.  They could hear above the thud-thud of the gorged floodgates, shrieks in two keys as monotonous as a steam-organ.

‘The high one’s the pig.’  Miss Sperrit laughed.

’All right!  I’ll get her out.  You stay where you are, and I’ll see you home afterwards.’

‘But the water’s only just over the road,’ she objected.

‘Never mind.  Don’t you move.  Promise?’

’All right.  You take my stick, then, and feel for holes in case anything’s washed out anywhere.  This is a lark!’

Midmore took it, and stepped into the water that moved sluggishly as yet across the farm road which ran to Sidney’s front door from the raised and metalled public road.  It was half way up to his knees when he knocked.  As he looked back Miss Sperrit’s lantern seemed to float in mid-ocean.

’You can’t come in or the water’ll come with you.  I’ve bunged up all the cracks,’ Mr. Sidney shouted from within.  ‘Who be ye?’

‘Take me out!  Take me out!’ the woman shrieked, and the pig from his sty behind the house urgently seconded the motion.

‘I’m Midmore!  Coxen’s old mill-dam is likely to go, they say.  Come out!’

’I told ’em it would when they made a fish-pond of it.  ’Twasn’t ever puddled proper.  But it’s a middlin’ wide valley.  She’s got room to spread....  Keep still, or I’ll take and duck you in the cellar!...  You go ‘ome, Mus’ Midmore, an’ take the law o’ Mus’ Lotten soon’s you’ve changed your socks.’

‘Confound you, aren’t you coming out?’

‘To catch my death o’ cold?  I’m all right where I be.  I’ve seen it before.  But you can take her.  She’s no sort o’ use or sense....  Climb out through the window.  Didn’t I tell you I’d plugged the door-cracks, you fool’s daughter?’ The parlour window opened, and the woman flung herself into Midmore’s arms, nearly knocking him down.  Mr. Sidney leaned out of the window, pipe in mouth.

’Take her ‘ome,’ he said, and added oracularly: 

     ’Two women in one house,
     Two cats an’ one mouse,
     Two dogs an’ one bone—­
     Which I will leave alone.

I’ve seen it before.’  Then he shut and fastened the window.

’A trap!  A trap!  You had ought to have brought a trap for me.  I’ll be drowned in this wet,’ the woman cried.

‘Hold up!  You can’t be any wetter than you are.  Come along!’ Midmore did not at all like the feel of the water over his boot-tops.