“I love you better still.”

“You do not:  you can’t.  It is the one thing I can beat you at and I will.”

“Try.  When will you be mine?”

“I am yours.  But if you mean when will I marry you, why, whenever you please.  We have suffered too cruelly, and loved too dearly, for me to put you off a single day for affectations and vanities.  When you please, my own.”

At this Henry kissed her little white feet with rapture, and kept kissing them, at intervals, all the rest of the way:  and the horrors of the night ended, to these two, in unutterable rapture, as they paced slowly along to Woodbine Villa with hearts full of wonder, gratitude, and joy.

Here they found lights burning, and learned from a servant that Mr. Carden was gone down to the scene of the flood in great agitation.

Henry told Grace not to worry herself, for that he would find him and relieve his fears.

He then made Grace promise to go to bed at once, and to lie within blankets.  She didn’t like that idea, but consented.  “It is my duty to obey you now in every thing,” said she.

Henry left her, and ran down to the Town Hall.

He was in that glorious state of bliss in which noble minds long to do good actions; and the obvious thing to do was to go and comfort the living survivors of the terrible disaster he had so narrowly escaped.

He found but one policeman there; the rest, and Ransome at their head, were doing their best; all but two, drowned on their beat in the very town of Hillsborough.

CHAPTER XLVI.

Round a great fire in the Town Hall were huddled a number of half-naked creatures, who had been driven out of their dilapidated homes; some of them had seen children or relatives perish in the flood they had themselves so narrowly escaped, and were bemoaning them with chattering teeth.

Little spoke them a word of comfort, promised them all clothes as soon as the shops should open, and hurried off to the lower part of the town in search of Ransome.

He soon found the line the flood had taken.  Between Poma Bridge and Hillsborough it had wasted itself considerably in a broad valley, but still it had gone clean through Hillsborough twelve feet high, demolishing and drowning.  Its terrible progress was marked by a layer of mud a foot thick, dotted with rocks, trees, wrecks of houses, machinery, furniture, barrels, mattresses, carcasses of animals, and dead bodies, most of them stark naked, the raging flood having torn their clothes off their backs.

Four corpses and two dead horses were lying in a lake of mud about the very door of the railway station; three of them were females in absolute nudity.  The fourth was a male, with one stocking on.  This proved to be Hillsbro’ Harry, warned in vain up at Damflask.  When he actually heard the flood come hissing, he had decided, on the whole, to dress, and had got the length of that one stocking, when the flying lake cut short his vegetation.