It seemed to echo back from the surface of those sagging terraces as I flew across their sloping ends, for it was somehow underneath them.  It was in the rustle of the wind that stirred the skirts of the drooping wellingtonias.  The beds of formal flowers passed it on to the creepers, red as blood, that crept over the unsightly building.  Into the structure of the vulgar and forbidding house it sank away; The Towers took it home.  The uncomely doors and windows seemed almost like mouths that had uttered the words themselves, and on the upper floors at that very moment I saw two maids in the act of closing them again.

And on the verandah, as I arrived breathless, and shaken in my soul, Frances and Mabel, standing by the tea table, looked up to greet me.  In the faces of both were clearly legible the signs of shock.  They watched me coming, yet so full of their own distress that they hardly noticed the state in which I came.  In the face of my hostess, however, I read another and a bigger thing than in the face of Frances.  Mabel knew.  She had experienced what I had experienced.  She had heard that awful sentence I had heard but heard it not for the first time; heard it, moreover, I verily believe, complete and to its dreadful end.

“Bill, did you hear that curious noise just now?” Frances asked it sharply before I could say a word.  Her manner was confused; she looked straight at me; and there was a tremor in her voice she could not hide.

“There’s wind about,” I said, “wind in the trees and sweeping round the walls.  It’s risen rather suddenly.”  My voice faltered rather.

“No.  It wasn’t wind,” she insisted, with a significance meant for me alone, but badly hidden.  “It was more like distant thunder, we thought.  How you ran too!” she added.  “What a pace you came across the terraces!”

I knew instantly from the way she said it that they both had already heard the sound before and were anxious to know if I had heard it, and how.  My interpretation was what they sought.

“It was a curiously deep sound, I admit.  It may have been big guns at sea,” I suggested, “forts or cruisers practicing.  The coast isn’t so very far, and with the wind in the right direction—­”

The expression on Mabel’s face stopped me dead.

“Like huge doors closing,” she said softly in her colorless voice, “enormous metal doors shutting against a mass of people clamoring to get out.”  The gravity, the note of hopelessness in her tones, was shocking.

Frances had gone into the house the instant Mabel began to speak.  “I’m cold,” she had said; “I think I’ll get a shawl.”  Mabel and I were alone.  I believe it was the first time we had been really alone since I arrived.  She looked up from the teacups, fixing her pallid eyes on mine.  She had made a question of the sentence.

“You hear it like that?” I asked innocently.  I purposely used the present tense.

She changed her stare from one eye to the other; it was absolutely expressionless.  My sister’s step sounded on the floor of the room behind us.