The lid was rising.  Now it was half-way up, and now, for the first time, it was lifted to its full height and stood a broad oval disc against the background of the forest.  The effect was strange.  The hangar had been made brilliant by many lamps, and their united glare pouring from its top and illuminating not only the surrounding treetops but the broad face of this uplifted disc, roused in the awed spectator a thrill such as in mythological times might have greeted the sudden sight of Vulcan’s smithy blazing on Olympian hills.  But the clang of iron on iron would have attended the flash and gleam of those unexpected fires, and here all was still save for that steady throb never heard in Olympus or the halls of Valhalla, the pant of the motor eager for flight in the upper air.

As they listened in a trance of burning hope which obliterated all else, this noise and all others near and distant, was suddenly lost in a loud clatter of writhing and twisting boughs which set the forest in a roar and seemed to heave the air about them.

A wind had swooped down from the east, bending everything before it and rattling the huge oval on which their eyes were fixed as though it would tear it from its hinges.

The three caught at each other’s hands in dismay.  The storm had come just on the verge of the enterprise, and no one might guess the result.

“Will he dare?  Will he dare?” whispered Doris, and Oswald answered, though it seemed next to impossible that he could have heard her: 

“He will dare.  But will he survive it?  Mr. Challoner,” he suddenly shouted in that gentleman’s ear, “what time is it now?”

Mr. Challoner, disengaging himself from their mutual grasp, knelt down by the lantern to consult his watch.

“One minute to eight,” he shouted back.

The forest was now a pandemonium.  Great boughs, split from their parent trunks, fell crashing to the ground in all directions.  The scream of the wind roused echoes which repeated themselves, here, there and everywhere.  No rain had fallen yet, but the sight of the clouds skurrying pell-mell through the glare thrown up from the shed, created such havoc in the already overstrained minds of the three onlookers, that they hardly heeded, when with a clatter and crash which at another time would have startled them into flight, the swaying oval before them was whirled from its hinges and thrown back against the trees already bending under the onslaught of the tempest.  Destruction seemed the natural accompaniment of the moment, and the only prayer which sprang to Oswald’s lips was that the motor whose throb yet lingered in their blood though no longer taken in by the ear, would either refuse to work or prove insufficient to lift the heavy car into this seething tumult of warring forces.  His brother’s life hung in the balance against his fame, and he could not but choose life for him.  Yet, as the multitudinous sounds about him yielded for a moment to that brother’s shout, and he knew that the moment had come, which would soon settle all, he found himself staring at the elliptical edge of the hangar, with an anticipation which held in it as much terror as joy, for the end of a great hope or the beginning of a great triumph was compressed into this trembling instant and if—­