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How much longer Denison would have rattled on in his effort to explain the robbery, I do not know. The telephone rang and a reporter from the Record, who had just read my own story in the Star, asked for an interview. I knew that it would be only a question of minutes now before the other men were wearing a path out on the stairs, and we managed to get away before the onrush began.

On July 24, 1915, under the attacks of these troops the Russians retreated on a front of forty kilometers, between the Vistula and the Bistritza, from eight to ten kilometers northward to prepared lines, their attempts to halt in intermediate positions being frustrated by the onrush of the victorious Teutonic forces in pursuit.

The prince could understand everything save this, that man might conquer him and that he could not snatch victory from the greatest enemy. He felt in himself endless daring, and he would have been astounded if any enemy whatever had not fled at sight of his steeds in full onrush.

"And then it was Amphinomus, who drew his whetted sword And fell on, making his onrush 'gainst Odysseus the glorious lord, If perchance he might get him out-doors: but Telemachus him forewent, And a cast of the brazen war-spear from behind him therewith sent Amidmost of his shoulders, that drave through his breast and out, And clattering he fell, and the earth all the breadth of his forehead smote."

They came on so rapidly and with such momentum that the Guards, trying in vain to stem the tide with the bayonet, were overwhelmed, and the British, in spite of desperate resistance, were forced back step by step. At some points the distance between the trenches was so small that it was utterly impossible to stop the onrush from one trench to the other.

The great event of this stay was an earthquake. Seated on a pleasant April evening in my rooms at the house built by Adolphus Trollope, near the Piazza dell' Independenza, I heard what seemed at first the rising of a storm; then the rushing of a mighty wind; then, as it grew stronger, apparently the gallop of a corps of cavalry in the neighboring avenue; but, almost instantly, it seemed to change into the onrush of a corps of artillery, and, a moment later, to strike the house, lifting its foundations as if by some mighty hand, and swaying it to and fro, everything creaking, groaning, rattling, and seeming likely to fall in upon us.

An hour or two earlier, awed by the abruptness of the outburst, Mademoiselle had shrunk from her fate; she had known fear. Now that she stood out voluntarily to meet it, she, like many a woman before and since, feared no longer. She was lifted out of and above herself. But death was long in coming. Some cause beyond their knowledge stayed the onrush of the mob along the street.

Bennett's resolution was taken. Never had he failed in accomplishing that upon which he set his mind. He would not fail now. Beyond a certain limit a limit which now he swiftly reached and passed Bennett's determination to carry his point became, as it were, a sort of obsession; the sweep of the tremendous power he unchained carried his own self along with it in its resistless onrush.

The woman had vaguely divined his purpose, and could not clear herself. When we arrived at the shore we occupied ourselves inconsequently. We hunted little fishes until Natalie's dainty boots were dripping. We examined quaint denizens of the shallow water until her gloves were spoilt. We sprang from rock to rock and evaded the onrush of the foaming waves.

But above all else, he wondered at himself and the rapidity of the fate which in two short weeks had swept him out of his solitude into the very vortex of a world unknown to him save through his books. He asked himself what power it was that had flung aside caste, religion, education, like a child's sandcastle before the onrush of a mighty tide.