A short dispute grew over the exact number of hours. One boy declared
that thirty hours had been reached. 'Father heerd'n yesterday morning as
he was aff to 's work in the town afore six: that brings 't nigh thirty
and he ha'n't stopped yet.'

The earl was invited to step inside the gate, a little way up to the
house, and under the commander's window, that he might obtain a better
hearing.

He swung round, walked away, walked back, and listened.

If it was indeed a voice, the voice, he would have said, was travelling
high in air along the sky.

Yesterday he had described to his wife Nevil's chattering of hundreds to
the minute. He had not realized the description, which had been only his
manner of painting delirium: there had been no warrant for it. He heard
the wild scudding voice imperfectly: it reminded him of a string of
winter geese changeing waters. Shower gusts, and the wail and hiss of
the rows of fir-trees bordering the garden, came between, and allowed him
a moment's incredulity as to its being a human voice. Such a cry will
often haunt the moors and wolds from above at nightfall. The voice hied
on, sank, seemed swallowed; it rose, as if above water, in a hush of wind
and trees. The trees bowed their heads rageing, the voice drowned; once
more to rise, chattering thrice rapidly, in a high-pitched key, thin,
shrill, weird, interminable, like winds through a crazy chamber-door at
midnight.

The voice of a broomstick-witch in the clouds could not be thinner and
stranger: Lord Romfrey had some such thought.