‘It’s the poor commander, sir,’ said a wet-shawled woman, shivering.

‘He’s been at it twenty hours already, sir,’ said one of the boys.

’Twenty-foor hour he ‘ve been at it,’ said another.

A short dispute grew over the exact number of hours.  One boy declared that thirty hours had been reached.  ’Father heerd’n yesterday morning as he was aff to ’s work in the town afore six:  that brings ’t nigh thirty and he ha’n’t stopped yet.’

The earl was invited to step inside the gate, a little way up to the house, and under the commander’s window, that he might obtain a better hearing.

He swung round, walked away, walked back, and listened.

If it was indeed a voice, the voice, he would have said, was travelling high in air along the sky.

Yesterday he had described to his wife Nevil’s chattering of hundreds to the minute.  He had not realized the description, which had been only his manner of painting delirium:  there had been no warrant for it.  He heard the wild scudding voice imperfectly:  it reminded him of a string of winter geese changeing waters.  Shower gusts, and the wail and hiss of the rows of fir-trees bordering the garden, came between, and allowed him a moment’s incredulity as to its being a human voice.  Such a cry will often haunt the moors and wolds from above at nightfall.  The voice hied on, sank, seemed swallowed; it rose, as if above water, in a hush of wind and trees.  The trees bowed their heads rageing, the voice drowned; once more to rise, chattering thrice rapidly, in a high-pitched key, thin, shrill, weird, interminable, like winds through a crazy chamber-door at midnight.

The voice of a broomstick-witch in the clouds could not be thinner and stranger:  Lord Romfrey had some such thought.

Dr. Gannet was the bearer of Miss Denham’s excuses to Lord Romfrey for the delay in begging him to enter the house:  in the confusion of the household his lordship’s card had been laid on the table below, and she was in the sick-room.

‘Is my nephew a dead man?’ said the earl.

The doctor weighed his reply.  ’He lives.  Whether he will, after the exhaustion of this prolonged fit of raving, I don’t dare to predict.  In the course of my experience I have never known anything like it.  He lives:  there’s the miracle, but he lives.’

‘On brandy?’

‘That would soon have sped him.’

‘Ha.  You have everything here that you want?’

‘Everything.’

‘He’s in your hands, Gannet.’

The earl was conducted to a sitting-room, where Dr. Gannet left him for a while.

Mindful that he was under the roof of his enemy, he remained standing, observing nothing.

The voice overheard was off at a prodigious rate, like the far sound of a yell ringing on and on.