h such force as to threaten to beat them
in; and successive discharges of thunder, accompanied with constant
flashes of fierce lightning, crashed and rumbled among the house-tops
and seemed to be at times actually booming through the room, immediately
over their heads.

In this way some fifteen minutes passed, seeming almost so many hours to
the young man, whatever they may have appeared to the young girl who sat
by the window, so absorbed by her own thoughts that she scarcely heard
the muttering thunder or saw the blinding flashes of the lightning.

Suddenly there was a louder and fiercer crash of thunder than any that
had preceded it--a crash of that peculiar sharpness indicating that it
must have struck the very house in which they heard it; and this
accompanied by one of those terribly intense flashes of lightning which
seemed to sear the eyeballs and play in blue flame through the air of
the room,--then followed by a heavy dull rumbling shock and boom like
that of a thousand pieces of artillery fired at once, rocking the
building to its foundation and threatening to send it tumbling in ruins
on their heads. Tom Leslie involuntarily put his hands to his eyes, to
shut out the flash, and Bell Crawford, at last startled, sprung from her
chair; but both were worse startled, the very second after, by a long,
loud, piercing shriek, in the voice of Josephine Harris, that burst from
the inner room and seemed like some cry extorted by mortal pain or
unendurable terror.

Both rushed towards the curtain, at once, but Leslie in advance--both
with the impression that some dreadful catastrophe connected with the
lightning must have occurred. But just as Leslie laid his hand upon the
curtain to draw it aside, it was dashed open from within, and Josephine
Harris literally flung herself through it, still shrieking and in that
deadly mortal terror which threatens the reason. She seemed about to
fall, and Tom Leslie stretched out his arms to receive her. She half
fell into them, then rolled, nearer than described any other motion,
into those of Bell Crawford; and almost before Leslie could quite
realize what had occurred, she lay with her head in Bell's lap, the
extremity of her terror over, uttering no word, but sobbing and moaning
like a little child that had been too severely dealt with and broken
down under the blow.

Tom Leslie's hand, it has been said, was on the curtain, to remove it.
He released it for the instant, to look