Audrey’s heart was violently beating.  She took the megaphone and put it to her lips, but no sound would come.  Then, as though it were breaking through an obstacle, the sound shot forth, and to Audrey it was a gigantic voice that functioned quite independently of her will.  Tremendously excited by the noise, she bawled louder and still louder.

“I’ve missed,” said Jane calmly in her ear.  “That’s enough, I think.  Come along.”

“But they can’t possibly see us,” said Audrey, breathless, lowering the instrument.

“Come along, dear,” Jane Foley insisted.

People with open mouths were crowding at the aperture of the inner wall, but, Jane going first, both girls pushed safely through the throng.  The wheel had stopped.  The entire congregation was staring agog, and in two seconds everybody divined, or had been nudged to the effect, that Jane and Audrey were the authoresses of the pother.

Jane still leading, they made for the exit.  But the first loud man rushed chivalrously in.

“Perlice!” he cried.  “Two bobbies a-coming.”

“Here!” said the second loud man.  “Here, misses.  Get on the wheel.  They’ll never get ye if ye sit in the middle back to back.”  He jumped on to the wheel himself, and indicated the mathematical centre.  Jane took the suggestion in a flash; Audrey was obedient.  They fixed themselves under directions, dropping the megaphone.  The wheel started, and the megaphone rattled across its smooth surface till it was shot off.  A policeman ran in, and hesitated; another man, in plain clothes, and wearing a rosette, ran in.

“That’s them,” said the rosette.  “I saw her with the grey hair from the gallery.”

The policeman sprang on to the wheel, and after terrific efforts fell sprawling and was thrown off.  The rosette met the same destiny.  A second policeman appeared, and with the fearless courage of his cloth, undeterred by the spectacle of prostrate forms, made a magnificent dash, and was equally floored.

As Audrey sat very upright, pressing her back against the back of Jane Foley and clutching at Jane Foley’s skirts with her hands behind her—­the locked pair were obliged thus to hold themselves exactly over the axis of the wheel, for the slightest change of position would have resulted in their being flung to the circumference and into the blue grip of the law—­she had visions of all her life just as though she had been drowning.  She admitted all her follies and wondered what madness could have prompted her remarkable escapades both in Paris and out of it.  She remembered Madame Piriac’s prophecy.  She was ready to wish the past year annihilated and herself back once more in parental captivity at Moze, the slave of an unalterable routine imposed by her father, without responsibility, without initiative and without joy.  And she lived again through the scenes in which she had smiled at the customs official, fibbed to Rosamund, taken the wounded Musa home in the taxi, spoken privily with the ageing yacht-owner, and laughed at the drowned detective in the area of the palace in Paget Gardens.