The place seemed to be filled with rolling smoke, and the house was so terribly still! He said again: "You can take Hamlet.

He's my best thing.

You can--You can--" There followed then, with the promptitude of a most admirably managed theatrical climax, a peal of thunder that seemed to strike the house with the iron hand of a giant.

Two more came, and then, for a second, a silence, more deadly than all the earlier havoc.
Jeremy felt that God had leapt upon him.

He opened his eyes, turned as though to run, and then saw, with a freezing check upon the very beat of his heart, that Hamlet was gone.
V There was no Hamlet! In that second of frantic unreasoning terror he received a conviction of God that no rationalistic training in later years was able to remove.
There was no Hamlet!--only the dusky dirty place with a black torrent-driven world beyond it.