“The usual storm,” remarked Mrs Sewin, looking up, as a low, heavy boom sounded from a black pile of cloud beyond the river valley. “We get one nearly every day now, and, oh dear, I never can get used to them, especially at night.”
“Pooh!” said the Major. “There’s no harm in them, and we’ve got two new conductors on the house. We’re right as trivets, eh, Glanton?”
“Absolutely, I should say,” I answered. We had completed our stroll and had just returned to the house. It would soon be dinner time and already was almost dark.
We were very merry that evening I remember. The Major, glad of someone else to talk to, was full of jokes and reminiscences, while I, happy in the consciousness of the presence beside me, joined heartily in the old man’s mirth, and we were all talking and laughing round the table as we had never talked and laughed before. Only Falkner was sulky, and said nothing; which was rather an advantage, for his remarks would certainly have been objectionable had he made any. Then suddenly in the middle of some comic anecdote, came a crash which seemed to shake the house to its very foundations, setting all the glasses and crockery on the table rattling. Mrs Sewin uttered a little scream.
“Mercy! We’re struck!” she gasped.
“Not we,” returned the Major. “But that was a blazer, by Jingo!”
“Pretty near,” growled Falkner.
“Oh, it’s horrid,” said Mrs Sewin, “and there’s no getting away from it.”
“No, there isn’t,” I said. “If you were in London now you might get away from it by burrowing underground. I knew a man there whose wife was so mortally scared of thunder and lightning that whenever a storm became imminent she used to make him take her all round the Inner Circle. She could neither see nor hear anything of it in the Underground train.”
“That was ingenious. Did you invent that story, Mr Glanton?” said Edith Sewin, mischievously.