The sea was also worth looking at. An hour ago it had been turquoise blue, reflecting the sky. Now it seemed to reflect a moonstone. It was gray-white, a corpse of itself, as it had been. Then even as they looked, it seemed to vanish altogether. The horizon line was blotted out, for the sky was turning gray also, and both above and below, over the cliff-edge, there was nothing but an invisible gray of emptiness. The sun halo spread both inwards and outwards, so that the sun itself peered like a white plate through some layer of vapor that had suddenly formed across the whole field of the heavens. And still not a whistle or sigh of wind sounded.
Hugh got up.
"As I have forgotten what my third conjuring trick is," he said, "I think we had better go home. It looks as if it was going to be a violent one."
He paused a moment, peering out into the invisible sea. Then there came a shrill faint scream from somewhere out in the dim immensity.
"Hold on to me, Nadine," he cried. "Or lie down."
He felt her arm in his, and they stood there together.
The scream increased in volume, becoming a maniac bellow. Then, like a solid wall, the wind hit them. It did not begin, out of the dead calm, as a breeze; it did not grow from breeze to wind; it came from seawards, like the waters of the Red Sea on the hosts of Pharaoh, an overwhelming wall of riot and motion. Nadine's books, all but the one she had cast over the cliff's edge, turned over, and lay with flapping pages; then like wounded birds they were blown along the hillside. The hat she had brought out with her, but had not put on, rose straight in the air, and vanished. Hugh, with Nadine on his arm, had leaned forward against this maniac blast, and the two were not thrown down by it. The path to the house lay straight up the steep hillside behind them, and turning they were so blown up it, that they stumbled in trying to keep pace to that irresistible torrent of wind that hurried them along. It took them but five minutes to get up the steep brae, while it had taken them ten minutes to walk down, and already there flew past them seaweed and sand and wrack, blown up from the beach below. Above, the sun was completely veiled, a riot of cloud had already obscured the higher air, but below, all was clear, and it looked as if a stone could be tossed upon the hills on the farther side of the bay.
They had to cross the garden before they came to the house. Already two trees had fallen before this hurricane-blast, and even as they hurried over the lawn, an elm, screaming in all its full-foliaged boughs, leaned towards them, and cracked and fell. Then a chimney in the house itself wavered in outline, and next moment it crashed down upon the roof, and a covey of flying tiles fell round them.
It required Hugh's full strength to close the door again, after they had entered, and Nadine turned to him, flushed and ecstatic.
"Hughie, how divine!" she said. "It can't be measured, that lovely force. It's infinite. I never knew there was strength like that. Why have we come in? Let's go out again. It's God: it's just God."