“I suppose I had better explain myself and my presence here,” she said. “My mother asked Mr. Merivale if we might come down and see the simplification of life on its native heath. So we came and lunched here. Then we all three went for a walk, but I was tired and headachy, and turned back. They went on. I knew a storm was coming, though when we set out it was quite clear. I told them so. And in the last ten minutes it has come up like the stroke of a black wing. Ah!”
She shut her eyes for a moment as a violent flicker of lightning cut its way down from the clouds in the south, and waited, still with shut eyes, for the thunder.
“It is still a long way off,” said Evelyn, as the remote growl answered.
“I know, but if you had seen the sky an hour ago. It was one turquoise. And I daren’t go back to Brockenhurst. I must stop here and wait for them.”
“May I take you back?” asked Evelyn.
“No; what good would that do? I may as well be terrified here as on the road. Also I can keep dry here.”
Again she winced as the lightning furrowed its zig-zag path through the clouds. This time the remoteness of the thunder was less reassuring; there was an angry, choking clap, which suggested that it meant business.
By this time Evelyn had recovered himself from the first stabbing surprise of finding Madge alone here. Her terror, too, of the approaching storm had drowned his dislike of it; also, for the moment, at any rate, his ordinary, natural instinct of alleviating the mere physical fear of this girl drowned the more intimate sense of what she was to him. If only she might become thoroughly frightened and cling to him—for this outrageous possibility did cross his mind—how he would rejoice in the necessity that such an accident would force on him the necessity, since he knew that he would be unable to offer resistance, of saying that which he had told Merivale only a few days before he felt he could not help saying! But to do him justice, he dismissed such a possibility altogether; that it had passed through his mind he could not help, but all his conscious self rejected it.
Then, at the moment of the angry answering thunder, a few big splashes of rain began to star the dry gravel-path below them, hot, splashing drops, like bullets. They fell with separate, distinct reports on the leaves of the lilacs and on the path; they hissed on the grass, they whispered in the yielding foliage of the roses of the pergola, and were like spirit-rappings on the roof of the verandah.
And Madge’s voice rose in suppressed terror: