Diana, suddenly--horribly--awake, found herself hurled from her seat.
Absolute darkness lapped her round; it was as though a thick black
curtain had descended, blotting out the whole world, while from behind
it, immeasurably hideous in that utter night, uprose an inferno of cries
and shrieks--the clamour of panic-stricken humanity.

Her hands, stretched stiffly out in front of her to ward off she knew not
what impending horror hidden by the dark, came in contact with the
framework of the window, and in an instant she was clinging to it,
pressing up against it with her body, her fingers gripping and clutching
at it as a rat, trapped in a well, claws madly at a projecting bit of
stonework. It was at least something solid out of that awful void.

"What's happened? What's happened? What's happened?"

She was whispering the question over and over again in a queer,
whimpering voice without the remotest idea of what she was saying. When
a stinging pain shot through her arm, as a jagged point of broken glass
bit into the flesh, and with a scream of utter, unreasoning terror she
let go her hold.

The next moment she felt herself grasped and held by a pair of arms, and
a voice spoke to her out of the darkness.

"Are you hurt? . . . My God, are you hurt?"

With a sob of relief she realised that it was the voice of her
fellow-traveller. He was here, close to her, something alive and human
in the midst of this nightmare of awful, unspeakable fear, and she clung