head. It came down covered with perspiration.

"It's amazingly close," he said, and walked to one of the French windows
opening to the west. The sun had gone down, and a brooding darkness lay
over all the valley, but far up in the sky he could trace the outline of
a cloud. Above, the stars shone with an unwonted brightness, but below
all was a bank of blue-black darkness. The air was intensely still; in
the silence he could hear the wash of the river. Grant reflected that
never before had he heard the wash of the river at that distance.

"Looks like a storm," he commented, casually, and suddenly felt
something tighten about his heart. The storms of the foothill country,
which occasionally sweep out of the mountains and down the valleys on
the shortest notice, had no terror for him; he had sat on horseback
under an oilskin slicker through the worst of them; but to-night!
Even as he watched, the distant glare of lightning threw the heaving
proportions of the thundercloud into sharp relief.

He turned to his chair, but found himself pacing the living-room with
an altogether inexplicable nervousness. He had held the line many a bad
night at the Front while Death spat out of the darkness on every hand;
he had smoked in the faces of his men to cover his own fear and to shame
them out of theirs; he had run the whole gamut of the emotion of the
trenches, but tonight something more awesome than any engine of man was
gathering its forces in the deep valleys. He shook himself to throw off
the morbidness that was settling upon him; he laughed, and the echo came
back haunting from the silent corners of the house. Then he lit a lamp
and set it, burning low, in the whim-room, and noted that the boy slept
on, all unconcerned.

"Damn Linder, anyway!" he exclaimed presently. "I believe he shook me
up more than I realized. He charged me with insincerity; me, who have
always made sincerity my special virtue.... Well, there may be something
in it."

A faint, indistinct growling, as of the grinding of mighty rocks, came
down from the distances.

"The storm will be nothing," he assured himself. "A gust of wind; a
spatter of rain; perhaps a dash of hail; then, of a sudden, a sky
so calm and peaceful one would wonder how it ever could have been
disturbed." Even as he spoke the house shivered in every timber as the
gale struck it and went whining by.

He rushed to the whim-room, but found the boy still sleeping soundly. "I
must stay up,"