"We were just going to the billiard room," said Harry. "Come with us, Uncle Francis; we will play pool, or cut in and out."
"Thank you, dear Harry, but I could not possibly play with the storm coming on," he said. "Thunder always affects me horribly. But if you will let me, I will come with you, and perhaps mark for you. I can not bear being alone in a thunderstorm."
They went to the billiard room, and Harry lit the lamps, while Mr. Francis, creeping like a mouse round the walls, and taking advantage of the cover of the curtains, began hurriedly closing the shutters.
"Oh, why do you do that?" asked Harry. "We shall not see the lightning."
Even as he spoke a swift streamer of violet light shot down, bisecting the square of window where Mr. Francis was nervously tugging at a shutter, and for a moment showing vividly the dark and stagnant shapes of the drooping trees. Mr. Francis's hand fell from the shutter as if it had been struck, and with a little moaning sigh he covered his face with his hands. Almost simultaneously a reverberating crash, not booming or rumbling, but short and sharp, answered the lightning, and Mr. Francis hurried with crouching steps to the sofa.
"Put up all the shutters, I implore you, Harry!" he said in a stifled voice. "Shut them quickly, and draw the curtains over them. Ah!" he cried, with a whistling intake of breath, "there it is again!"
His terror was too evident and deep-seated not to be pitied, and the two young men hastily closed all the shutters, drawing the curtains over them, as Mr. Francis had requested.
"Is it done? is it done?" he asked in a muffled voice, his face half buried in a sofa cushion. "Be quick—oh, be quick!"
For an hour he sat there with closed eyes and finger-muffled ears, while the storm exploded overhead, the picture of cowering terror, while the other two played a couple of games. From time to time, if there had been a comparatively long interval of quiet, he would begin to take a little interest in the play, and once, even when for some five minutes the steady tattoo of the rain on the leads overhead had continued unbroken by any more violent sound, he went to the marking board. But next moment a dirling peal made the rest drop from his hand, and at a shuffling run he went back to the sofa, and again hid ears and eyes.
The storm passed gradually away, the sharp crack of the overhead thunder gave place to distant and yet more distant rumblings; and the afternoon was not over when Mr. Francis, cautiously opening a chink of shutter, let in a long, dusty ray of sunshine. The heavens were clear again, washed by the rain, and of a most pellucid blue, and Mr. Francis, recovering with mercurial rapidity, went gaily from window to window, unshuttering.