He got up and came round to where Darcy sat.

“If it is so, so be it,” he said.  “Because, my dear fellow, I am near, so splendidly near to the final revelation.  To-day the pipes have sounded almost without pause.  I have even heard the rustle in the bushes, I believe, of Pan’s coming.  I have seen, yes, I saw to-day, the bushes pushed aside as if by a hand, and piece of a face, not human, peered through.  But I was not frightened, at least I did not run away this time.”

He took a turn up to the window and back again.

“Yes, there is suffering all through,” he said, “and I have left it all out of my search.  Perhaps, as you say, the revelation will be that.  And in that case, it will be good-bye.  I have gone on one line.  I shall have gone too far along one road, without having explored the other.  But I can’t go back now.  I wouldn’t if I could; not a step would I retrace!  In any case, whatever the revelation is, it will be God.  I’m sure of that.”

The rainy weather soon passed, and with the return of the sun Darcy again joined Frank in long rambling days.  It grew extraordinarily hotter, and with the fresh bursting of life, after the rain, Frank’s vitality seemed to blaze higher and higher.  Then, as is the habit of the English weather, one evening clouds began to bank themselves up in the west, the sun went down in a glare of coppery thunder-rack, and the whole earth broiling under an unspeakable oppression and sultriness paused and panted for the storm.  After sunset the remote fires of lightning began to wink and flicker on the horizon, but when bed-time came the storm seemed to have moved no nearer, though a very low unceasing noise of thunder was audible.  Weary and oppressed by the stress of the day, Darcy fell at once into a heavy uncomforting sleep.

He woke suddenly into full consciousness, with the din of some appalling explosion of thunder in his ears, and sat up in bed with racing heart.  Then for a moment, as he recovered himself from the panic-land which lies between sleeping and waking, there was silence, except for the steady hissing of rain on the shrubs outside his window.  But suddenly that silence was shattered and shredded into fragments by a scream from somewhere close at hand outside in the black garden, a scream of supreme and despairing terror.  Again, and once again it shrilled up, and then a babble of awful words was interjected.  A quivering sobbing voice that he knew, said: 

“My God, oh, my God; oh, Christ!”

And then followed a little mocking, bleating laugh.  Then was silence again; only the rain hissed on the shrubs.

All this was but the affair of a moment, and without pause either to put on clothes or light a candle, Darcy was already fumbling at his door-handle.  Even as he opened it he met a terror-stricken face outside, that of the man-servant who carried a light.

“Did you hear?” he asked.

The man’s face was bleached to a dull shining whiteness.