ding her breath.

The dusky stillness wrought upon the nerves of the riders, producing a
vague, discomfortable sense of foreboding. Talk grew fitful; and was
instinctively carried on in lowered tones.

"Push on a bit faster, Mrs Desmond. It would be as well to get out
where the trees are thinner before the worst is upon us."

Colonel Mayhew's voice had an anxious note. He had weathered the
opening storm of many monsoons; but his daughter's presence wakened in
him a new fear of the thunderbolts of the gods.

Even as he spoke, a phosphorescent gleam sped through the trees, like a
passing soul; and a threatening growl rumbled up from the South. It
was the prelude. Two minutes later, rocks, stems, branches, and the
minutest fir-needles that flickered against the grey, showed like
ink-strokes on tarnished silver as a forked flash, leaped, quivering,
from the heart of a blue-black cloud. The report that followed, after
scarce five seconds of stillness, was smart, crisp, short as a
revolver-shot; and long before a hundred peaks had made an end of
flinging back the sound, a second flash and crash--in swifter
succession--smote the eyes and ears of the riders, who now urged their
horses to a canter, _saises_, coolies, and three devoted dogs panting
zealously behind them.

Their hope was to gain shelter in the Government woodsheds, two miles
ahead, before the inevitable downpour came to drench their bodies and
impede their progress. But fate was in a merciless mood on that June
morning.

The third flash split up the sky as a stone splits a window pane.
Pulsating streaks of fire, red, green, and blue, radiated in all
directions, half-blinding them with the brazen glare. And before it
faded, a crackling detonation seemed to rip the very heavens from marge
to marge.

As yet no rain had fallen: and for ten deafening minutes the little
party rode in silence through an inferno of reiterate light and sound.
Once or twice Quita glanced at her husband, cantering beside her, and
wondered vaguely when she would hear him speak again; wondered, too, at
her own matter-of-fact acceptance of that which a week ago had appeared
impossible. But the storm stunned heart and brain, as well as eye and
ear. Everything human,--life, death, love itself,--seemed trivial in
face of this stupendous battle of the elements. Above them, and on all
sides of them, the lightning leaped and darted, like a live thing
seeking its prey. It was as i