By twelve o'clock Cowfold was quiet and peaceable.
Citizens were left to wonder how their town, lying usually so
sleepily still, like a farmyard on a summer Sunday afternoon, could
ever transform itself after this fashion. Men unknown and never
before seen seemed suddenly to spring out of the earth, and as
suddenly to disappear. Who were they? Respectable Cowfold, which
thought it knew everybody in the place, could not tell. There was no
sign of their existence on the next day. People gathered together
and looked at the mischief wrought the night before, and talked
everlastingly about it; but the doers of it vanished, rapt away
apparently into an invisible world. On Sunday next, at one o'clock,
Cowfold Square, save for a few windows not yet mended, looked just as
it always looked; that is to say, not a soul was visible in it, and
the pump was, as usual, chained.
The band of rescuers had passed George as he stood in the garden, and
when they had gone he knocked at the door. It was a long time before
anybody came, but at last it was partly opened, just as far as the
chain would permit, and the Reverend John Broad, looking very white
and with a candle in his hand appeared.
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