WHEN Bob, carrying the baby, ran down in answer to his mother’s call, Jem remained where he was, looking out at the storm. In spite of the natural feeling of nervousness, he enjoyed seeing the lightning flash out from the thick bank of heavy clouds, showing their shapes where all had seemed one mass of dull gray, and dart in a brilliant jagged streak across the sky. For a little time he forgot everything else in this strange pleasure. In his mind was the thought that it was like seeing fireworks, only that no fireworks were half so grand.

Flash after flash. Peal after peal. There had not been such a thunder-storm here for years. Jem forgot even to look at the pool stretching across the road; but when at last he did bring his eyes down again to the earth, it was to see that the sheet of water, starred all over with the plashing rain-drops, extended now in places actually over the pavement. A cab came along, and the boy laughed till the tears came into his eyes at the concern of the old lady inside, who kept putting out her head and telling the cabman to go another way, while he insisted on driving straight forwards, splashing up the very centre of the road, without paying the slightest heed to the old lady’s anger.

Jem watched until the cab and its occupant were safe on dry land, or rather on land as dry as any could be in such a rain.

“I wonder what it’s like at the back,” he said then. And when the flashes grew less frequent, and seemed to come more from behind the house, he ran into the bed-room that looked on the yard where Mrs. Kayll and Madge were wont to hang out the clothes to dry every week, and on numbers of other back windows and other yards, where other people also hung out their clothes to dry.

The ground here was pretty nearly covered with standing water, but there was at present nothing much to be seen, except that in the next yard but one several little jets of water forced their way here and there through the fence and spurted fiercely into the inclosure. Beyond this last fence was a large space of open ground not yet built upon and sloping gently upwards, so that the rain ran down the incline until checked by the wooden palings. There it rose and rose, and the jets grew larger as the water wore for itself a passage, but the weight beyond was too great to be kept back long by such a feeble barricade. It gave way suddenly with a report like that of a pistol, and the boards were flung here and there as the flood dashed onwards, sweeping away in its course the next fence, and then those on each side of the Kaylls’ yard, while at the same time Jem felt the floor shake under his feet.

At this he shrank back from the window in horror, for there in an instant was water all round him, and nothing left standing of the divisions between the yards but a post here and there, like the last relics of a wrecked vessel.

Running out into the passage with a vague intention of getting away at once into safety, Jem was about to descend the stairs, when he found to his consternation that the lowest steps were out of sight in muddy water.

“Mother! Bob! Madge! Where are you?” he cried.

There was no answer.

He called again and again, but still there was no reply save a kind of washing sound from below, and a long muttering growl from above. Where could they be? Had this rush of water come upon them suddenly, and were they drowned down there in the kitchen or little parlour?

His first impulse was to go and look, though his heart beat terribly fast, and all his strength seemed to have gone and left him weak and trembling. He descended a few steps as far as the edge of the water, and then all at once the sight of it made him sick and giddy, and he would have fallen in if he had not turned round quickly, and, holding by the balustrade, climbed up again to the bed-room.

“They can’t have gone and left me,” he sobbed. “They wouldn’t do that, without even calling to me to come. And here I am, and can’t get out! I shall have to stop and be drowned.”

He hurried once more to the front window, and looked out first in one direction, then in the other. Why, there they were—his mother under an umbrella with the baby, Madge and Bob in the road, higher up the hill, with the rain beating upon them, and a few people standing about talking to them earnestly. He tried to open the window and shout to them, but the sash stuck in its frame, and before he had succeeded in making it slide up, Mrs. Kayll had carried the baby into a house, near which she had been standing, and Madge had followed. Bob was left alone, looking about him as though trying to find a dry way to get back.

Jem shouted his name, but a clap of thunder at that moment made his voice inaudible; he saw his brother turn to speak to some one, and then walk across to the other side of the road.

They had left him to his fate, then! He was deserted. The wild thought crossed his mind that they had perhaps done it to punish him for the faults that came back to his memory now with perfect clearness. He saw all in a moment that he had up till now cared far more for himself than for anyone else, and this was the result: those who ought to have loved him had forgotten him in the moment of danger, or, worse still, had wilfully left him to do the best he could for himself.

Poor Jem! This was a lesson he never unlearnt. The misery and fear of the discovery were so great that he was completely overcome. He dropped down on the bed-room floor unconscious. It was just at that point of time that Bob, picking his way back with water nearly up to his ankles, stopped short with a sudden exclamation, and stared about him.“Why,” he said aloud, “where on earth is Jem?”

The recollection that his brother had been with them at first, and that he had seen nothing of him since the water began to enter the house, turned him quite cold with misgivings. How could he have so entirely forgotten the boy all this time?

Not that it was really surprising in the sudden excitement and bustle of such an unexpected disaster. And besides, the Kayll boys were so accustomed to taking care of themselves, that it was not natural to anyone to trouble about them, or inquire where they were when absent.

“Oh, he’ll turn up,” was the family feeling if a boy were missing. But now Bob was aghast at the thought that Jem might not turn up. He waded towards the house with pale face and staring eyes. His brother must be somewhere within, yet he was at neither window;—where could he be?

The rain had ceased to fall at last, and the depth of the flood was not increasing, even though as yet there was no evidence of its growing less. As people began fast to collect, now that the worst was over, and to make some attempts to clear away the rubbish that was choking up the gratings over the drains, so that the water might run through more quickly, he asked of several if they had seen Jem; but no one remembered anything of him since the beginning of the storm. As Bob explained his fear that the boy must be still in the house, which it was now impossible to enter except by the bed-room windows, a ladder was quickly fetched and laid across from the road to the sill of that which Jem, on his discovery that he was left behind, had thrown open.

Another minute, and Bob was in the little bed-room, lifting up his brother, who still lay in a dead faint on the floor. As he raised him he heard the people shouting to him from the outside to be quick, and without knowing the meaning of their excited cries he carried Jem with all speed to the window, passed him out to a man who was half-way up the ladder ready to receive him, slid down closely after them, and was seized by several hands and dragged across to the other side of the road, just as with a rumbling sound, and then a terrible crash, the little old house and the one adjoining it fell forward, a heap of ruins.