r the neighboring peaks, rocking the
air on the uplands and filling his soul with dismay. But when quiet had
come again, hope returned with it. She was not only standing upright but
was crying in his ear:

"Can I get into the house? If I could stay there to-night, I could go
back to-morrow."

"I'll see that you get in, if I have to break in a window," he answered.
"But you're sure that you will not be afraid to stay out this terrible
storm in a house with no neighbors within half a mile?"

"I know the house. I have been here before, and if Elvira Brown could
face the storms of forty years from her solitary home, I can surely face
a single one, without losing my courage."

He said no more, but approaching the house, began to test such windows as
he could reach. He finally broke in a pane and released the latch; after
that, entrance was easy.

Yet after he had opened the way for her and she had stepped into the dim
interior, he felt loth to leave her. Duty called him away. The passenger
awaiting him up the road was a man he could not afford to disappoint; yet
he stood there longer than the occasion warranted, with the knob of the
door in hand, watching her struggle with the lamp, which she at last
succeeded in lighting. As the walls of the hall and her anxiously bending
figure burst into view, he uttered a quick "Good-by!"

She turned, smiled and tried to thank him, but the words failed to leave
her lips. A nearer and fiercer bolt had shot to earth at that instant,
striking a tree so near that the noise of its fall mingled with the crash
of the heavens. When it had ceased, he had gone. He could not face the
look with which she met this new catastrophe.

That look never again left her. When she saw herself in a glass, as she
presently did, on entering one of the rooms lamp in hand, she was
startled and muttered:

"My own mother would pass me by if she saw me now. I could go anywhere I
wished without fear or dread. Why did I leave New York?" And setting the
lamp down, she covered her face and wept.

The storm abated; a few minutes of fiercely pouring rain, and all was
over. She was left in ghastly quiet--a quiet which was almost worse than
the turmoil which had preceded it--to face her memories and accustom
herself to the thought that the solitary woman with whose life everything
she looked upon was so intimately connected was gone, never to pass
through these doors again or touch with deft and careful fingers the