mplete stillness; then a few scattered
drops of rain fell, and ceased; and then, with a heavy, travelling
roar, the wind came rushing up the valley. It thundered in the
cavernous chimneys of Mount Music; it bawled and whooped at the
windows, and shook them with a human fury, as though it were life or
death to it to get in, as though it were maddened by the failure of
its surprise attack. Christian and her ancient servitors ran from room
to room, barring shutters, fastening doors, the draughts down the long
passages snatching at the candle flames, the old man and woman full of
forebodings and of reminiscences of former storms, that came to
Christian in broken scraps, through the rattle of windows and the
shaking clatter of doors within the house, and the shrieking rage of
the wind outside. She sat up late, sorting and arranging things in her
room. She had none of the fears that might, for another, have filled
the empty house with visitants from another world, and might have
taught her to listen for footsteps in the echoing passages and knocks
on the shaking doors. She had always lived on the borderland, and was
naturalised in both spheres, but to-night, the voices that had so
often given her help, were, when she most needed help, silent.

"I have nothing left now," she said to herself, "but memories,
hungering memories--"

She was to leave Mount Music on Wednesday, and on Thursday, Larry was
to be married to Tishy Mangan. What room was there for phantom fears
when these things were certainties? What spectre from the other world
has power to break a heart?

Deep in the night there was a lull, a strange moment of arrest, that
endured for scarcely as long as that one could count ten, and then,
with the returning tempest, the rain that had been pent behind it, was
hurled upon the world. All that night, and all the following day, the
rain was like a wall about the house. It was flung in masses against
the windows, as buckets of water are flung on a deck. To look forth was
as though one looked through a dense sheet of moving ice. Gutters,
eave-shoots, tanks, overflowed. The sorely-tried roof was mastered, and
in all its angles and valleys yielded entrance to the enemy. Up in the
top story hurrying drips beat, like metronomes, all the _tempi_, from a
ponderous _adagio_ to a racing _prestissimo_. Buckets and jugs and
baths filled, and were emptied, and filled again, the old Evans pair
waddling to and fro, elated, almost grati