s umbrella when he got out into the road.

Helen's room was over the porch, the windows facing north, looking out
upon the pike and across the fields beyond. "Please don't light the
lamp, Minnie," she said, when they had gone upstairs. "I don't need a
light." Miss Briscoe was flitting about the room, hunting for matches.
In the darkness she came to her friend, and laid a kind, large hand on
Helen's eyes, and the hand became wet. She drew Helen's head down on her
shoulder and sat beside her on the bed.

"Sweetheart, you mustn't fret," she soothed, in motherly fashion.
"Don't you worry, dear. He's all right. It isn't your fault, dear. They
wouldn't come on a night like this."

But Helen drew away and went to the window, flattening her arm against
the pane, her forehead pressed against her arm. She had let him go; she
had let him go alone. She had forgotten the danger that always beset
him. She had been so crazy, she had seen nothing, thought of nothing.
She had let him go into that, and into the storm, alone. Who knew better
than she how cruel they were? She had seen the fire leap from the white
blossom and heard the ball whistle, the ball they had meant for his
heart, that good, great heart. She had run to him the night before--why
had she let him go into the unknown and the storm to-night? But how
could she have stopped him? How could she have kept him, after what he
had said? She peered into the night through distorting tears.

The wind had gone down a little, but only a little, and the electrical
flashes danced all around the horizon in magnificent display, sometimes
far away, sometimes dazingly near, the darkness trebly deep between the
intervals when the long sweep of flat lands lay in dazzling clearness,
clean-cut in the washed air to the finest detail of stricken field and
heaving woodland. A staggering flame clove earth and sky; sheets of
light came following it, and a frightful uproar shook the house and
rattled the casements, but over the crash of thunder Minnie heard her
friend's loud scream and saw her spring back from the window with both
hands, palm outward, pressed to her face. She leaped to her and threw
her arms about her.

"What is it?"

"Look!" Helen dragged her to the window. "At the next flash--the fence
beyond the meadow----"

"What was it? What was it like?" The lightning flashed incessantly.
Helen tried to point; her hand only jerked from side to side.

"_Look_!" she cried.

"I see noth