She roused herself with a start. She became aware that the night
outside was no longer still. That there was an excitement down
below on the bridge and a running in the street and a flickering
of searchlights among the clouds from some high place away beyond
the Trocadero. And then the excitement came surging up past her
and invaded the hall within.
One of the sentinels from the terrace stood at the upper end of
the room, gesticulating and shouting something.
And all the world had changed. A kind of throbbing. She couldn't
understand. It was as if all the water-pipes and concealed
machinery and cables of the ways beneath, were beating--as pulses
beat. And about her blew something like a wind--a wind that was
dismay.
Her eyes went to the face of the Marshal as a frightened child
might look towards its mother.
He was still serene. He was frowning slightly, she thought, but
that was natural enough, for the Earl of Delhi, with one hand
gauntly gesticulating, had taken him by the arm and was all too
manifestly disposed to drag him towards the great door that
opened on the terrace. And Viard was hurrying towards the huge
windows and doing so in the strangest of attitudes, bent forward
and with eyes upturned.
Something up there?
And then it was as if thunder broke overhead.
The sound struck her like a blow. She crouched together against
the masonry and looked up. She saw three black shapes swooping
down through the torn clouds, and from a point a little below two
of them, there had already started curling trails of red....
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