ring sullenly in the distance.

She spurred her broncho into the darkness lit by flashes of this lurid
light.

A flash of light.

Then darkness, thick as purple velvet.

Furiously she urged the animal forward into this horrible unknown
which had the look of the wrath of God come upon her for her doubting,
pressed on by an innate feeling of affection for those two who had
befriended her, hurrying to their aid, spurred by an instinctive
foreboding of impending evil in this awful roaring, whirling,
murderous sound of the wild winds gone suddenly stark mad.

As she sped on, something swept past her with a great hoarse roar,
distinguishable above the deafening roar of the wind.

It was Seth's herd, stampeding, running with the wind and bellowing
with fear.

She winged her way into the terror of the darkness.

Ready an hour before for death in any form, she now all at once found
herself panting with fear of it, gasping with a deadly fear of a
ghastly fate, of being crushed and mangled, of dying by inches beneath
some horrible weight, but this did not deter her.

Afraid to breathe a prayer to the God whom she had dared to question,
she winged her way breathlessly on and on.

Then sheets of water, as if the skies had opened and emptied
themselves,--and a vivid flash of lightning revealing the wind's wet
wings, its wild whirling fingers dripping.

Cyclona saw it coming in that flash, a fiendish thing apparently
alive, copper-colored, funnel-shaped, ghastly. She threw herself
forward on the neck of her broncho, grasping his mane. Then a blow
from a great unseen hand out of the darkness struck them both, felling
them.

During the next few minutes of inky blackness, of indescribable
terror, of flying missiles armed with death, Cyclona lay unconscious.
When she opened her eyes a calm light of the evenness of twilight had
spread over the track of the cyclone, and her head lay pillowed on
Hugh Walsingham's shoulder. Close beside her was a ragged bough and
her broncho lay dead near by. The bough was the hand that had struck
them out of the darkness, had thrown her to the sod and killed her
animal.

"I came very near," she sighed, "to standing before God."

By and by with Walsingham's help she stood.

"Where is the house?" she asked, bewildered by the barrenness of the
spot on which the topsy turvy house had stood for so many years.

"It is gone," said he.

Cyclona pressed both hands to her face and rocked back an