e darkened to a metallic
purplish green, then paled to the livid color of jade under a sallow
sky. There was a swift succession of transformation scenes, when,
between the bursts of thunder, the park, swathed in sheet lightning,
shot up behind the windows, now blue, now amethyst, now rose, now
green. Then the storm suddenly shifted its quarters and broke
through a rampart of solid darkness piled high in the southwest.

"Fifteen seconds," said the Colonel, "between that flash and the
thunder."

Among these phenomena the Colonel moved like a little gentleman
enchanted; he darted to and fro, and in and out, as if the elements
were his natural home; his hurried notes in the little memorandum
book outsped the lightning. For the last thirty years there had not
been such weather in the meteorological history of Wickshire.

But the storm was only in its playful infancy; the forked lightning
and the rain were yet to come. The last train up, timed to meet the
express at the junction, left Whithorn-in-Arden at 3.10, and it was
a good hour's drive to the station. As they toyed with the lightning
on their plates Durant and Miss Chatterton looked at Frida. Fate,
the weather, and the Colonel, a trinity of hostile powers, were
arrayed against her, and the three were one.

At the stroke of two the Colonel remarked blandly, "There will be no
driving to the station to-day, so I have countermanded the
brougham."

They were dressed ready for the journey, and, as the Colonel spoke
Frida got up, drew down her veil and put on her gloves.

"That was a pity," she said quietly, "seeing that we've got to go."

The Colonel was blander than ever; he waved his hand. "Go, by all
means," said he, "but not in my brougham. There I put my foot down."

("Not there, not there, oh, gallant Colonel," said Durant to
himself, "but where you have always put it, on Frida's lovely
neck.")

She started, looked steadily at her father, then, to Durant's
surprise, she shrugged her shoulders; not as an Englishwoman shrugs
them, but in the graceful Continental manner. The movement suggested
that the foreign strain in her was dominant at the moment; it
further implied that she was shaking her neck free from the
Colonel's foot. She walked to the window and looked out upon the
storm. With the neck strained slightly forward, her nostrils
quivering, her whole figure eager and lean and tense, she looked
like some fine and nervous animal, say a deerhound ready to s