me more direct
highway. He therefore started to follow it. He could scarcely walk
against the wind; it blew with such increasing fury. Charlie shivered
away from its fierce breath and snuggled his tiny body more warmly under
his protector's arm, withdrawing himself entirely from view. And now
with a sudden hissing whirl, down came the rain. The two opposing forces
of cloud met with a sudden rush, and emptied their pent-up torrents on
the earth, while a low muttering noise, not of the wind, betokened
thunder. The prolonged heat of the last month had been very great all
over the country, and a suppressed volcano was smouldering in the heart
of the heavens, ready to shoot forth fire. The roaring of the sea grew
more distinct as Helmsley descended from the height and came nearer to
the coast line,--and the mingled scream of the angry surf on the shore
and the sword-like sweep of the rain, rang in his ears deafeningly, with
a kind of monotonous horror. His head began to swim, and his eyes were
half blinded by the sharp showers that whipped his face with blown drops
as hard and cold as hail. On he went, however, more like a struggling
dreamer in a dream, than with actual consciousness,--and darker and
wilder grew the storm. A forked flash of lightning, running suddenly
like melted lava down the sky, flung half a second's lurid blue glare
athwart the deepening blackness,--and in less than two minutes it was
followed by the first decisive peal of thunder rolling in deep
reverberations from sea to land, from land to sea again. The war of the
elements had begun in earnest. Amid their increasing giant wrath,
Helmsley stumbled almost unseeingly along,--keeping his head down and
leaning more heavily than was his usual wont upon the stout ash stick
which was part of the workman's outfit he had purchased for himself in
Bristol, and which now served him as his best support. In the gathering
gloom, with his stooping thin figure, he looked more like a faded leaf
fluttering in the gale than a man, and he was beginning now to realise
with keen disappointment that his strength was not equal to the strain
he had been putting upon it. The weight of his seventy years was
pressing him down,--and a sudden thrill of nervous terror ran through
him lest his whim for wandering should cost him his life.

"And if I were to die of exhaustion out here on the hills, what would be
said of me?" he thought--"They would find my body--perhaps--after some
days