He started back suddenly, putting a finger between his collar and his neck, and looking upward.  Next moment he dropped his head and brushed a drop of water from his nose. Several of the platform party turned their faces up, started back, and upset their chairs. Two or three thin streams of water, as from the eyelets in the spray of a shower bath, were descending from the unplastered ceiling. Noakes edged a little to the left, and was opening his mouth again, when with a hiss and clatter like a heavy shower of rain upon a glass house, the whole contents of Templeton’s experimental tank poured down between the laths of the matchboard.  Noakes gasped and spluttered, the ladies of his party shrieked, all the occupants of the platform stampeded like a flock of sheep, overturning their chairs, obstructing one another in their mad flight for the stairs.  For one moment of amazement the audience was silent; then a roar of inextinguishable laughter broke from nearly three hundred throats, whistles and cat-calls resounded, the Tommies looked round for the stoker, whom, by some obscure instinct or intuition, they connected with the catastrophic shower.  But Eves had slipped away.