Constance, of the Viking breed, would let him see that he had no monopoly of the family motto: "Audèo." She, too, could dare.
"Down you go, Enid," she cried. "He shall have his cocoa, poor man."
He looked over his shoulder and caught his daughter glancing at him from the well of the stairs.
"Bad night," he shouted cheerfully, and he cheated her quick intelligence a second time.
They were gone. Perchance it was his last sight of them in this life. Three times the stalwart frame-work creaked. Once it moved so perceptibly that the curtain rings jingled. Then he remembered the words of Isaiah:
"For thou hast been a strength to the poor, a strength to the needy in his distress, a refuge from the storm, a shadow from the heat, when the blast of the terrible ones is as a storm against the wall."
The blast of the terrible ones! What a vivid pen-picture of the awesome forces of nature. How long would this tornado continue? Already it must have strewed its path with havoc at sea and on land. His physical senses were elevated to the supernatural. He seemed to acquire abnormal powers of sight and hearing. He could see the trees bending before the wrathful wind, hear the crashing tiles and brickwork as houses were demolished and people hurled to death. But there was no ecstasy of soul, no mental altitude. In quick reaction came the fanciful memory of the hardy old salt who cheered his shipmates during a terrific gale with the trite remark:
"I pity the poor folk ashore on a night like this."
What a curious jumble of emotions jostled in his brain. A step from the sublime to the ridiculous! Not even a step. They were inextricably interwoven, the woof and the warp of things. He recalled the odd expression of an officer who had passed unscathed through the Inferno of Spion Kop.
"I had no sense of fear," said he, "but my teeth began to ache."