“Supposing we were to go down into the enclosure?” she said.
“Hadn’t you a specimen of what that would mean the other day? We have notices posted everywhere warning people against venturing in; but this part of the park is right away from any public road, and we don’t encourage trippers. Hallo!”—looking up—“it’s lucky you got your snapshots. It has started to rain.”
Big drops were pattering down. The sky had become quickly overcast, and an ominous boom from a black, inky background of cloud told that a summer shower was upon them with characteristic suddenness. They regained the shed where they had left their bicycles only in the nick of time, as, with a roar and a rush, the rain whirled upon them in a tremendous downpour. Then the vivid sheeting of blue electricity, almost simultaneously with the sharp thunder-crack. The girl gave a little start.
“Are you afraid of thunder?” asked Wagram, with a smile.
“Not now. Sometimes when I am alone I get rather nervous, but now I don’t mind it a bit.”
She spoke no more than the truth. She would have welcomed another hour of the most appalling thunderstorm that ever raged to sit here as she was doing now, and spend it in this man’s society. Yet a wooden shed, open in front, and overhung by tall, spreading oaks, is not perhaps, the safest refuge in the world under all the circumstances. But the thunder and lightning soon passed over, although it continued to rain smartly.
“Mr Wagram, there is something I would like to talk to you about,” began the girl, rather constrainedly, after a quite unwonted interval of silence—for her. “I have been thinking of late that I would like to be a Catholic.”
Wagram looked up keenly.
“Have you given the question careful study?” he said.
“I have thought it over a great deal. I am fairly at home in the Catholic services. You see, I was travelling on the Continent as companion for a time, and then we always attended them, so I do know something about it.”