The candle fell from the hand of the Keeper of the Key, and he could be seen in the moonlight groping for the door-knob, his hand on the figures of the group of water nymphs.  In a moment he gave a low moan and, his head hanging over his breast, he staggered down the marble steps.  “Alas,” cried the guards, “now is the great man broken!” He made for the drawbridge crying out, “The lid, the lid.  Slide it back over the well!” The guards and servants pressed after him, but not one of them ever got into the town again.  Across the bridge was now pouring a wild rush of human panic.  Carriages, carts, cars, horsemen, mules, donkeys, were flying from the Seven Sisters laden with men and women and whole families.  Crowds pressed forward on foot.  Animals, dogs, cats, pigs, sheep, cows, came pellmell with them.  Drivers stood in their seats flaying their horses as if driven by madness.  The animals rolled their eyes, snorted steam from their nostrils, strained forward with desperate zeal.  Once or twice the struggling mass jammed, and men fought each other like beasts.  The cries of people being trampled to death broke out in harrowing protest.  For a moment the shepherd boy saw the form of a priest rise up, bearing aloft the stark outline of a cross, and then he disappeared.

Over that night of terror was the unnatural brilliance of the swoollen moon.  All this the shepherd boy saw in a few eternal moments.  Then he cried out, “How up! how up! how up!” and immediately the damsel tripped down the broad staircase of the mansion, dressed in white robes, her hair loose about her shoulders.  Never had she looked so frail and beautiful, the lily of the valley!  The shepherd boy told her what had come to pass.  She cried out for her father.  “I am the daughter of the Keeper of the Key,” she said.  “I shall stand by his side at the well in this great hour.”

“I am now the master of the town of the Seven Sisters,” said the shepherd boy.  “I am the Keeper of the Key.”  And he held up the secret key.

The damsel, seeing this, and catching sight of what was taking place at the drawbridge, fell back in a swoon on the carpet of the hall.  The shepherd boy raised her in his arms and fled for the hills.  Along the road was the wild stampede of the people, all straining for the hills, pouring in a mad rush from the valley and the town.  Behind them were the still madder, swifter, more terrible waters, coming in sudden thuds, in furious drives, eddying and sculping and rearing in an orgy or remorseless and heartrending destruction.  Down before that roaring avalanche went walls and trees and buildings.  The shepherd boy saw men give up the struggle for escape, cowering by the roadside, and women, turning from the race to the hills, rushed back to meet the oncoming waters with arms outspread and insanity in their wild eyes.