nd burst upon the earth. It was such a storm as people
remember for a lifetime and which in few lifetimes is seen at all.

Marco stood still in the midst of the rage and flooding, blinding roar
of it. After the first few minutes he knew he could do nothing to
shield himself. Down the garden paths he heard cataracts rushing. He
held his cap pressed against his eyes because he seemed to stand in the
midst of darting flames. The crashes, cannon reports and thunderings,
and the jagged streams of light came so close to one another that he
seemed deafened as well as blinded. He wondered if he should ever be
able to hear human voices again when it was over. That he was drenched
to the skin and that the water poured from his clothes as if he were
himself a cataract was so small a detail that he was scarcely aware of
it. He stood still, bracing his body, and waited. If he had been a
Samavian soldier in the trenches and such a storm had broken upon him
and his comrades, they could only have braced themselves and waited.
This was what he found himself thinking when the tumult and downpour
were at their worst. There were men who had waited in the midst of a
rain of bullets.

It was not long after this thought had come to him that there occurred
the first temporary lull in the storm. Its fury perhaps reached its
height and broke at that moment. A yellow flame had torn its jagged
way across the heavens, and an earth-rending crash had thundered itself
into rumblings which actually died away before breaking forth again.
Marco took his cap from his eyes and drew a long breath. He drew two
long breaths. It was as he began drawing a third and realizing the
strange feeling of the almost stillness about him that he heard a new
kind of sound at the side of the garden nearest his hiding-place. It
sounded like the creak of a door opening somewhere in the wall behind
the laurel hedge. Some one was coming into the garden by a private
entrance. He pushed aside the young boughs again and tried to see, but
the darkness was too dense. Yet he could hear if the thunder would not
break again. There was the sound of feet on the wet gravel, the
footsteps of more than one person coming toward where he stood, but not
as if afraid of being heard; merely as if they were at liberty to come
in by what entrance they chose. Marco remained very still. A sudden
hope gave him a shock of joy. If the man with the tired face chose to
hide himse