set the forest in a roar
and seemed to heave the air about them.

A wind had swooped down from the east, bending everything before it and
rattling the huge oval on which their eyes were fixed as though it would
tear it from its hinges.

The three caught at each other's hands in dismay. The storm had come
just on the verge of the enterprise, and no one might guess the result.

"Will he dare? Will he dare?" whispered Doris, and Oswald answered,
though it seemed next to impossible that he could have heard her:

"He will dare. But will he survive it? Mr. Challoner," he suddenly
shouted in that gentleman's ear, "what time is it now?"

Mr. Challoner, disengaging himself from their mutual grasp, knelt down
by the lantern to consult his watch.

"One minute to eight," he shouted back.

The forest was now a pandemonium. Great boughs, split from their parent
trunks, fell crashing to the ground in all directions. The scream of
the wind roused echoes which repeated themselves, here, there and
everywhere. No rain had fallen yet, but the sight of the clouds
skurrying pell-mell through the glare thrown up from the shed, created
such havoc in the already overstrained minds of the three onlookers,
that they hardly heeded, when with a clatter and crash which at another
time would have startled them into flight, the swaying oval before them
was whirled from its hinges and thrown back against the trees already
bending under the onslaught of the tempest. Destruction seemed the
natural accompaniment of the moment, and the only prayer which sprang to
Oswald's lips was that the motor whose throb yet lingered in their blood
though no longer taken in by the ear, would either refuse to work or
prove insufficient to lift the heavy car into this seething tumult of
warring forces. His brother's life hung in the balance against his fame,
and he could not but choose life for him. Yet, as the multitudinous
sounds about him yielded for a moment to that brother's shout, and he
knew that the moment had come, which would soon settle all, he
found himself staring at the elliptical edge of the hangar, with an
anticipation which held in it as much terror as joy, for the end of a
great hope or the beginning of a great triumph was compressed into this
trembling instant and if--

Great God! he sees it! They all see it! Plainly against that portion
of the disc which still lifted itself above the further wall, a curious
moving mass appears, lengthens, take