Warren looked at her with warm admiration, and something else—which he succeeded in disguising the more easily that—as we have said—she was in total ignorance of those two portraits which he cherished in secret.
“Here, father,” she called out, as they reached the place where Le Sage and Wyvern were standing, “call those boys back. The horses won’t be wanted till to-morrow. Just look what an awful storm there is working up. Right across the way too.”
“By Jove, so there is,” said Le Sage. “Hope it means real rain, that’s all. You two ’ll have to shake down here to-night.”
The swift glance exchanged between Wyvern and Lalanté did not escape Warren. To those two the coming storm had brought reprieve. Only of a few hours it was true, but—still a reprieve. Their real farewell had been made, still—
Throwing out its dark and jagged streamers in advance, the black curtain of cloud came driving up. A blinding gleam, and one of those awful metallic crashes that are as though the world itself were cleft in twain, and, ever growing louder as it drew nearer, a confused raving roar.
“Hail, by Jove!” pronounced Le Sage. “That’s a nuisance because it means little or no rain. Where are those two youngsters, Lalanté?”
“Indoors.”
“And that’s where we’d better get, and pretty soon,” pronounced Wyvern.
But before they got there a hard and splitting impact caused all to hurry their pace, for it was as though they were being pelted with stones; and indeed they were, for the great white ice-globes came crashing down, as with a roar like that of an advancing tidal wave the mighty hailstorm was upon them; in its terrific clamour almost drowning the bellowing of the thunder.
“We’re well out of that,” went on Wyvern, as they gained the shelter of the house. “By George, if one had come in for it in an open camp, it would have been a case of covering one’s head with one’s saddle. The stones are as big as hens’ eggs. I’ve only seen it like that once before. Look.”