She found him at his telescope, as outraged as Miss Gentry, and enjoying himself immensely over the spectacle that shattered his Sunday dullness. His big Bible had been lugged upstairs, and now lay on the bed, open at the Deluge; and the bucket that received his ceiling-drippings had been kicked over in his excitement. “That’s the Lord’s punishment on they Sabbath-breakers,” he said gleefully. Nor could all Jinny’s arguments—as she wiped up his private flood—bring home to him his inverted logic. “The Lord knowed ’twas in their hearts to break it,” he persisted. “‘And it repented the Lord that He had made man.’”

“Oh, it’s not so bad as the flood of 2352,” said Jinny, airing her Spelling-Book chronology.

“Wait till the Brad flows over the dyke,” he chuckled. “That’ll spill all over Long Bradmarsh, ay, and run down towards Chipstone.”

“Oh, you don’t think it will get over the dyke?” she said anxiously.

“Mebbe to Babylon itself,” he said voluptuously.

“All the more reason they should try to save what they can,” she urged. “Time and tide wait for no man, and why should any man wait for the tide? It’s like with shepherds and stockmen that can’t ever have their Sunday. Come down to dinner.”

But the Gaffer’s eye was glued to his tube. “That’s as good as harvest!” he exclaimed in shocked exhilaration. “Dash my buttons ef they ain’t thatchin’ the stack they carted over from Pipit’s meadow. And they’re makin’ new mangold and potato clamps.”

“So long as they don’t get largesse,” Jinny maintained.

The Gaffer groaned. “Largesse or no largesse, Oi never seen sech a Sunday in all my born days. What a pity Sidrach dedn’t live to see it!”

When she at last got him to surrender the spy-glass, she could not refrain from taking a peep herself. She was astonished at the swift rise of the waters. Already the hedgerows were disappearing, while an avenue of elms rising mysteriously out of a lagoon was the sole indication of a road she had passed on her way to church. A swan and cygnets were now sailing upon it, with darker and less distinguishable objects tossing around. A bed of osiers seemed to be in its natural element as it rose from the waters that islanded a farm. The black, snow-powdered barn looked like the upturned hull of some squat galleon, and the haystacks thatched as with hoar-frost had the air of cliffs crumbling before the sea. One clump of bare trees rose out of the glassy void like the rigging of a sinking ship. Her world had suffered a water-change into something rich and strange in which only the rare protuberances enabled her to trace out the original earth-pattern. Even seagulls were floating, and frank-herons wheeling, and kingfishers diving. Her grandfather watched her like one who had provided the show. “That makes me feel a youngster agen,” he cried. “’Tis like the good ole times when there warn’t no drainage-mills ne yet Frog Farms.”

“Frog Farm isn’t swept away?” she cried with a sudden clamminess at her heart.

“Oi wouldn’t give much for the farniture downstairs,” he said, with sinister satisfaction. “That’s the lowest house in the parish. And then ye deny ’tis the Lord’s hand a-chastenin’ the evil-doers. Oi reckon though they’ve packed their waluables in the coach, the pirate thieves, and scuttled off Beacon Hill way.”

Without replying, she gazed through a tremulous telescope at the distant point where the Brad seemed to wind immediately behind the roof of Frog Farm but the convolutions and dip of the land, aided by an intervening copse, hid everything from her except the quaint chimney, though the smoke fluttering in the wind showed that if the Gaffer’s hypothesis was correct, evacuation must have been recent. It was something, though, to see the farmhouse still uncollapsed, though her imagination surrounded it with water like the more visible farm. She was glad to remember that Master Peartree at least would have been in his hut on higher ground, keeping vigil over the lambing ewes.

“Somebody ought to go and see if they’ve really got away,” she said anxiously.

“They’ll be all right ef the Lord don’t want to punish ’em,” he said surlily. “And ef He do, ’tain’t for nobody to baulk Him!”

After dinner he forwent his nap. The Lord had sent him not only a spectacle but a great new eye, and had even denuded the trees that might in summer have blocked his view, and he was not the man to “sin his mercies.” Jinny had ceased to be anxious about his catching cold at the casement—evidently his life of driving had inured him—so, wrapping a blanket round his smock and the new-knitted muffler round his throat, she left him to enjoy himself while she cleared away the frugal meal.

Suddenly she heard a roar as of distant thunder, followed by a great shout from above.

“It’s busted! It’s busted!”

She rushed up in alarm, nearly upsetting his bucket herself.

“Behold!” he cried Biblically, handing her the glass. “That’s busted a piece out of the bank.”

She looked—and beheld indeed! In the embankment that guarded Long Bradmarsh gaped a breach of some fifty yards, while giant blocks of clay that must have weighed tons were swirling like children’s marbles towards the Long Bradmarsh meadows whence panic-stricken labourers were now fleeing backwards.

“It’s caught ’em, the Sabbath-breakers,” said the Gaffer ecstatically. “That didn’t wait to flow over the dyke.”

“I’ve got to go and give help on the Ridge,” she said resolutely. And not all his arguments or threats could stay her cart. “Christ said the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath,” she urged, and the text silenced him. But it was not so easy to dispose of the pietism of Methusalem, whose blank incredulity before her threatened disturbance of the holy day was only overcome by the convincing commonplaceness with which Nip barked around. The poor horse must have imagined that he had overslept himself and that it was Tuesday. Fortunately “the Ridge” lay downwards for him, and the crowds and the everyday bustle finally disillusioned him of his Sunday feeling, and he allowed his cart to be laden with the carrots, swedes, and mangolds that had lain in such snug rows packed betwixt hurdles and a sort of straw thatch kept down by long poles. At first Jinny kept looking round for the rival carrier, but either he would not demean his coach to such service, or he was water-bound.

Jinny asked several people whether they had seen the Flynts and whether Frog Farm would be safe, but if nobody could supply any information, nobody thought there would be any serious danger.

“They’ll be all right,” said Farmer Gale bitterly. “It’s my land there that’s drowned, and my stacks that are floating.” He was on the scene now, directing operations, cursing his looker. For the first time the breezy Cornishman doubted his father’s cuteness in buying up soil whose fatness was only due to its centuries of repose under water. “The land’ll be out of heart for years,” he lamented. Jinny could not help a secret satisfaction in seeing the hard-hearted farmer confronted by a force as remorseless as that which had swept Uncle Lilliwhyte out of his cottage. Nor could she escape a still subtler pleasure in thus heaping coals of fire on his head. But both these joys as well as her anxiety about Frog Farm were soon lost in the glow of service. It was such a delight to be no longer shamming work, while to give had become an almost forgotten pleasure.

When she returned to the field for a second load, the flood was already creeping over it, and the early darkness and a pale quarter-moon threw a new weirdness over these unknown waters. She found the lane outside still more flooded, and as Methusalem plashed homewards, she encountered Uncle Lilliwhyte rising from the waters like a disreputable river-god. He was dexterously spearing mangolds as they floated past, and stacking them, mixed with drowned hares, in a wheelbarrow, itself apparently flotsam. He had an air of legal operations, there was none of the furtive look that goes with bulges in smock-frocks, and Jinny, too, thought he was justly avenged on his evictor, though she refused to desecrate the Sabbath by buying any of his spoils. She could not help feeling rewarded when Nip appeared with a rabbit gratis. As he had not killed it, she refrained from rebuking him, and he came in subsequently for the bones. But his pride at having thus at last achieved his ideal almost turned his head, and all the more bitter was his humiliation when his next epoch-making capture—a dead rat—was rejected with reproach.