Obedient to something urgent and imperative in the voices of both men—something that breathed of danger—the three women hastened from the room. Jane's candle flared and went out in the draught from the suddenly opened door, and in the smothering darkness they stumbled pell-mell down the stairs.
A dim light burning in the hall showed them Mrs. Selwyn cowering against her husband, her face hidden, sobbing hysterically, and in a moment Sara had taken Dick's place, wrapping her strong arms about the shuddering woman.
“Go on!” she whispered to him. “Go and get Tim down!”
He nodded, releasing himself with gentle force from his wife's clinging fingers, which had closed upon his arm like a vise.
Immediately she lifted up her voice in a thin, querulous shriek—
“No! Dick, Dick—don't leave me! Dick”—
. . . And then it came—sped from that hovering Hate which hung above—dropping soundlessly, implacable through the utter darkness of the night and crashing into devilish life against a corner of the house.
Followed by a terrible flash and roar—a chaos of unimaginable sound. It seemed as though the whole world had split into fragments and were rocketing off into space; and, in quick succession, came the rumble of falling beams and masonry, and the dense dust of disintegrated plaster mingling with the fumes of high explosive.
Sara was conscious of being shot violently across the hall, and then everything went out in illimitable black darkness.