e."

Sometimes, when clouds roll up, black with thunder and rain, to
overshadow the heavens and to deluge the earth, between their masses
you may catch a momentary gleam of blue, faint and infinitely far away,
deep, untroubled, most beautiful. Judith had caught such a glimpse that
evening as she bade Percival good-night.

CHAPTER XLVII.

CONSEQUENCES.

The story of the elopement was in all the local papers, which seemed for
once to be printed on Judith Lisle's heart. It was the latest and most
exciting topic of conversation in the neighborhood of Standon Square and
St. Sylvester's, and was made doubly interesting by the utter collapse
of Mr. Clifton's Easter services, which were to have been something very
remarkable indeed. Every one recollected the young organist who was so
handsome and who played so divinely. People forgot that his father had
failed very disgracefully, and only remembered that Bertie had once been
in a much better position. There was a sort of general impression that
he was an aristocratic young hero who lived in lofty poverty, and was a
genius into the bargain. No one was very precise about it, but Beethoven
and Mendelssohn and all those people were likely to find themselves
eclipsed some fine morning. Emmeline Nash of course became a heroine to
match, vaguely sketched as slim, tall and fair. She had stayed on at
Miss Crawford's at an age when a girl's education is generally supposed
to be finished, and she had not always gone home for the holidays. These
facts were of course the germs of a romance. There was a quarrel with
her father, who wished her to marry some one. No one knew who the some
one might be, but as he was only a shadowy figure in the background, his
name was of no importance. Emmeline and her music-master had fallen in
love at first sight; and when the moment came for the girl to return
home, to be persecuted by her father's threats and by the attentions of
the shadowy lover, her heart had failed her and she had consented to fly
with the young musician. As Judith had said, it was a young Lochinvar
romance--a boy-and-girl attachment. No one seemed to think much the
worse of Bertie. Hardly any one called him a fortune-hunter, for
Emmeline's money seemed trivial compared with the wealth that he was
supposed to have once possessed. And no one thought anything at all of
Judith herself or of Miss Crawford.

It would soon be over and forgotten, but Judith suffered acutely while