a great tree which
held roof and wall in its embrace.

Why did it quiver? Why did the ground beneath her feet seem to rock and
all nature darken as with the falling of a pall. The storm was upon her.
It had rolled up with incredible swiftness and was about to break over
her head. With a shock she realized her position. No shelter, and the
storm of the season upon her! What should she do? There was no way of
getting into the house at the rear, for the bushes were too thick. She
must accept her fate, be drenched to the skin, perhaps smitten by the
next thunderbolt. But Antoinette Duclos was no coward, so far as physical
ills were concerned. She drew herself up straight against the trunk of
the tree, thinking that this, bad as it was, was better than shelter with
the enemy at the door. She would be calm, and she was fast growing so
when she suddenly became aware of a man standing very near and hunting
her out through the dusk.

She never knew why the scream which rose in her throat did not pass her
lips. Her terror was unspeakable, for she had heard no advance; indeed,
there was too much noise about her for that. But it was the silent terror
of despair, for she thought it was the man from whom she had made this
great effort at escape. But he soon proved to her he was not. It was just
the driver of the stagecoach, returned to see what had become of her. He
had feared to find her stricken down in the road, and when he saw her
clinging alone and in a maddened way to this tree, he made no bones of
speaking to her with all necessary plainness.

"I asked you if it was Missus Brown you had come to see," he called to
her through the din. "And you wouldn't answer."

"Why should I?" she shouted back. "Why do you speak like that? Has
anything happened to her?"

"Don't you know?"

"No, no--she was well when I heard from her last, and expecting me, or so
she wrote. Is she--she--"

"Dead, missus. We buried her last Tuesday. I'm sorry, but--"

Why finish? She was lying out before him, straight and stark in the road.
A bolt of lightning which at that moment tore its way through the heavens
brought into startling view her face, white with distraction, framed in a
mass of iron-gray locks released by her fall.

"Good heaven!" burst from the lips of the frightened man as he stooped to
lift her. "What am I going to do now?"

The thunder answered him, or rather it robbed him for the moment of all
thought. Peal after peal rattled ove