amiable and
stupid--except in her love for him--and his sentiments towards her had
been a mixture of boredom, and the tolerant consideration due to the
bestower of substantial benefits. Nevertheless, she had awakened,
during a spasm of remorseful self-abasement, some nobler quality latent
in the man.

And now--as that flash of lightning illuminated Bridget's face and made
him keenly sensitive to the charm of her personality--her wayward
fascination, her inconsistencies, her weakness, her temperamental
craving for dramatic contrast, her reckless toying with emotion--by a
curious law of paradox, there came back upon Willoughby Maule that
scene with his dying wife, and he had again the flashing perception of
something sacred, unexplainable, to which his own nature could not
reach.

It sobered him. He had had the impulse to snatch her to his breast, to
seal the half-compact with a lover's kiss, so passionate that the
memory of it must for ever bind her to him.

But the impulse was past. They stood perfectly silent, stiff, in the
interval--it seemed a very long one--between the lightning flash, and
the distant reverberation of thunder which followed it.

Then he said mechanically, like one walking out of a dream? 'There's
going to be a storm. Are you frightened?'

'No,' she answered. 'I'm never frightened of storms!' and added,
'besides, Colin would be so glad of rain.'

Before he could reply, she had glided away again and he was alone.

He thought it strange that she should be thinking of her husband and
his material interests just then.

CHAPTER 5

It must have been a little while after midnight when Bridget was
awakened by more thunder and lightning and a confused tornado of sound.
She had been dreaming that Harris was throwing her from the gully
cliffs on to the boulders in its bed--only it seemed to her bewildered
senses that the boulders rose towards her instead of her descending to
meet them. Next she discovered that rain was pattering on the zinc
roof, and that the violent concussions she felt beneath her must be due
to the horns of goats knocking up against the boards of her bedroom.
Ah! she thought, the men had forgotten to pen the goats, and they were
sheltering from the rain in the open space under the floor of the
house. There could be no more sleep for her that night, unless they
were dislodged.

She waited through the din until there came a lull in the storm, then
got up and put on her s