“I’ve brought you a little dog,” said Mr. Dalroy, introducing the rampant¹ Quoodle. “I had him brought down here in a large hamper² labelled ‘Explosives,’ a title which appears to have been well selected.”  
He had bowed to Lady Enid on entering and taken Joan’s hand with the least suggestion that he wanted to do something else with it; but he resolutely³ resumed his conversation, which was on the subject of dogs.
 
“People who bring back dogs,” he said, “are always under a cloud of suspicion. Sometimes it is hideously⁴ hinted that the citizen who brings the dog back with him is identical with the citizen who took the dog away with him. In my case, of course, such conduct is inconceivable. But the returners of dogs, that prosperous and increasing class, are also accused,” he went on, looking straight at Joan, with blank blue eyes, “of coming back for a Reward. There is more truth in this charge.”
 
Then, with a change of manner more extraordinary than any revolution, even the revolution that was roaring round the house, he took her hand again and kissed it, saying, with a confounding seriousness,
 
“I know at least that you will pray for my soul.”
 
“You had better pray for mine, if I have one,” answered Joan, “but why now?”
 
“Because,” said Patrick, “you will hear from outside, you may even see from that turret⁵ window something which in brute⁶ fact has never been seen in England since Poor Monmouth’s army went down. In spirit and in truth it has not happened since Saladin and Cœur de Lion crashed together. I only add one thing, and that you know already. I have lived loving you and I shall die loving you. It is the only dimension of the Universe in which I have not wandered and gone astray. I leave the dog to guard you;” and he disappeared down the old broken staircase.
 
Lady Enid was much mystified that no popular pursuit assailed⁷ this stair or invaded the house. But Lady Joan knew better. She had gone, on the suggestion she most cared about, into the turret room and looked out of its many windows on to the abandoned copse and tunnel, which were now fenced off with high walls, the boundary of the mysterious property next door. Across that high barrier she could not even see the tunnel, and barely the tops of the tallest trees which hid its entrance from sight. But in an instant she knew that Dalroy was not hurling⁸ his forces on Ivywood at all, but on the house and estate beyond it.
 
And then followed a sight that was not an experience but rather a revolving⁹ vision. She could never describe it afterward¹⁰, nor could any of those involved in so violent and mystical a wheel. She had seen a huge wall of a breaker wash all over the parade at Pebblewick; and wondered that so huge a hammer could be made merely of water. She had never had a notion of what it is like when it is made of men.
 
The palisade, put up by the new landlord in front of the old tangled¹² ground by the tunnel, she had long regarded as something as settled and ordinary as one of the walls of the drawing room. It swung and split and sprang into a thousand pieces under the mere¹¹ blow of human bodies bursting with rage; and the great wave crested¹³ the obstacle more clearly than she had ever seen any great wave crest¹⁴ the parade. Only, when the fence was broken, she saw behind it something that robbed her of reason; so that she seemed to be living in all ages and all lands at once. She never could describe the vision afterward; but she always denied it was a dream. She said it was worse; it was something more real than reality. It was a line of real soldiers, which is always a magnificent sight. But they might have been the soldiers of Hannibal or of Attila, they might have been dug up from the cemeteries¹⁵ of Sidon and Babylon, for all Joan had to do with them. There, encamped in English meadows, with a hawthorn-tree in front of them and three beeches¹⁶ behind, was something that has never been in camp nearer than some leagues south of Paris, ............