led and groaned like a ship in a whole gale, and the
wind sent great waves of rain along the veranda. A northern window had
been blown in and hastily patched. Although but nine o'clock the sky was
as black as midnight. For several days there had been merely a quiet
steady fall, but during the afternoon the northern rain belt had sent
down another great storm and it had been rising ever since.

Isabel, unable to go out, had washed her hair, and was still sitting on
the hearth-rug, drying it, when she heard a shout outside, then the slam
of a door at the back of the house, and voices in the kitchen. She was
too warm and comfortable to be interested. If it were a tramp he was
welcome to the shelter of the house; if a burglar there were two men to
dispose of him, and her jewels were in a safe-deposit box in San
Francisco. She loved a storm and had given herself up to one of those
moods of pure delight in the present moment, although she had been in
anything but a good-humor of late, and solitude had palled. But a raging
storm, the sense of the absolute dominance of nature and the littleness
of man, always exalted her. She knew that the old house was secure on
its foundations, and, but that she loved comfort and warmth, she would
have liked to be out on the marsh in a boat; tense with the
difficulties of keeping the channel and avoiding the shoals and
mud-banks obliterated by the risen waters. It amused her to imagine
herself out there, while dwelling pleasurably, in a doubled
consciousness, upon the warm red tints of her room. Her dreams were
barely disturbed by the unknown interloper, but they were shattered a
moment later by Gwynne's voice and rapid step in the hall.

She had intended to greet him with a cool hauteur after his neglect of
nearly a month, but she could not rise in time; and, enveloped in a mass
of hair, spread over a yard of the floor, it was impossible to be
dignified. So she resolved to be charming.

"I had to come in the back way like a tramp and leave my oil-skins in
the kitchen," he announced, abruptly, as he entered. "Don't get up. I
have always wanted to see your hair down. So did Jimmy, I remember. Did
he?"

"Certainly not. Neither would you if you had not chosen such an
extraordinary time to call. I am delighted to see you once more after
all these years, but--what on earth possessed you?" His eyes were
glittering, although he had dropped his lids, and he did not sit down,
but moved restlessly