The fabric of the mill tilted more and more; the space to which the two vile creatures hung grew less and less.  There was no longer room for both of them.  They began to quarrel, to curse and jibber at each other, their fierce, bestial faces not an inch apart as they crouched there on hands and knees.  The water rose a little, they were kneeling in it now, and the man, putting down his bald head, butted at the woman, almost thrusting her from her perch.  But she was strong and active, she struggled back again; she did more, with an eel-like wriggle she climbed upon his back, weighing him down.  He strove to shake her off but could not, for on that heaving, rolling surface he dared not loose his hand-grip, so he turned his flat and florid face, and, seizing her leg between his teeth, bit and worried at it.  In her pain and rage Meg screeched aloud—­that was the cry which Foy had heard.  Then suddenly she drew a knife from her bosom—­Elsa saw it flash in the moonlight—­and stabbed downwards once, twice, thrice.

Elsa shut her eyes.  When she opened them again the woman was alone upon the little patch of red boarding, her body splayed out over it like that of a dead frog.  So she lay a while till suddenly the cap of the Red Mill dipped slowly like a lady who makes a Court curtsey, and she vanished.  It rose again and Meg was still there, moaning in her terror and water running from her dress.  Then again it dipped, this time more deeply, and when the patch of rusty boarding slowly reappeared, it was empty.  No, not quite, for clinging to it, yowling and spitting, was the half-wild black cat which Elsa had seen wandering about the mill.  But of Black Meg there was no trace.

It was dreadfully cold up there hanging to the sail-bar, for now that the rain had finished, it began to freeze.  Indeed, had it not chanced that Elsa was dressed in her warm winter gown with fur upon it, and dry from her head to her feet, it is probable that she would have fallen off and perished in the water.  As it was gradually her body became numb and her senses faded.  She seemed to know that all this matter of her forced marriage, of the flood, and of the end of Simon and Meg, was nothing but a dream, a very evil nightmare from which she would awake presently to find herself snug and warm in her own bed in the Bree Straat.  Of course it must be a nightmare, for look, there, on the bare patch of boarding beneath, the hideous struggle repeated itself.  There lay Hague Simon gnawing at his wife’s foot, only his fat, white face was gone, and in place of it he wore the head of a cat, for she, the watcher, could see its glowing eyes fixed upon her.  And Meg—­look how her lean limbs gripped him round the body.  Listen to the thudding noise as the great knife fell between his shoulders.  And now, see—­she was growing tall, she had become a giantess, her face shot across the gulf of water and swam upwards through the shadows till it was within a foot of her.