blurred lamp-post. She was coming toward him. He bent his
head and lowered his umbrella and lost sight of her as they approached,
she with the storm behind her, driven with hardly more resistance than
the last year's blackened leaves that blew with her, he assailed by it
and making the best way he could. Certainly the wind was taking her part
and his, when in another moment her skirt whipped against him and he saw
her face glimmer out. A mere wreck of lines and shadows it seemed in the
livid light, with suddenly perceiving eyes and lips that cried his name.
She had on a hat and a cloak, but carried no umbrella, and her hands
were bare and wet. Pitifully the storm blew her into his arms, a tossed
and straying thing that could not speak for sobs; pitifully and with a
rough incoherent sound he gathered and held her in that refuge. A rising
fear and a great solicitude laid a finger upon his craving embrace of
her; he had a sense of something strangely different in her, of the
unknown irremediable. Yet she was there, in his arms, as she had never
been before; her plight but made her in a manner sweeter; the storm that
brought her barricaded them in the empty spaces of the street with a
divinely entreating solitude. He had been prepared to meet her in the
lighted decorum of her father's house and he knew what he should say.
He was not prepared to take her out of the tempest, helpless and weeping
and lost for the harbour of his heart, and nothing could he say. He
locked his lips against all that came murmuring to them. But his arms
tightened about her and he drew her into the shelter of a wall that
jutted out in the irregular street; and there they stood and clung
together in a long, close, broken silence that covered the downfall of
her spirit. It was the moment of their great experience of one another;
never again, in whatever crisis, could either know so deep, so wonderful
a fathoming of the other soul. Once as it passed, Advena put up her hand
and touched his cheek: There were tears on it, and she trembled, and
wound her arm about his neck, and held up her face to his. "No," he
muttered, and crushed it against his breast. There without complaint
she let it lie; she was all submission to him: his blood leaped and his
spirit groaned with the knowledge of it.

"Why did you come out? Why did you come, dear?" he said at last.

"I don't know. There was such a wind. I could not stay in the house."

She spoke timidly, in a voice