"The cloudburst was too much for the dam," he answered regretfully. "It went off with a noise like a big gun, a while back. I expect the lake is flooding the whole place and messing up everything from our cellar to the chickenhouse. Daylight is due pretty soon, now, and the storm is dying down. We'll be able to add up the damage, after a bit."
"The water came down the chimney and drowned Bagheera," Phillida bravely tried to summon nonchalance. "Isn't it lucky you and Desire could not get started in the car, after all? Fancy being out in that!"
Desire Michell steadied her soft lips and gave her quota to the shelter of commonplace speech we raised between ourselves and emotions too recently felt.
"It was like the tropical storms in Papua, where I lived until this year," she said. "Once, one blew down the mission house."
Vere's weather prediction proved quite right. In an hour the storm had exhausted itself, or passed away to other places. Sunrise came with a veritable glory of crimson and gold, blazing through air washed limpidly pure by the rain. The east held a troop of small clouds red as flamingoes flying against a shining sky; last traces of our tempest.
We stood on the porch together to survey an unfamiliar scene in the rosy light. Water overlay lawns and paths, so the house stood in a wide, shallow lake whose ripples lapped around the white cement steps and the pillars of the porte-cochère. Phillida's Pekin ducks floated and fed on this new waterway as contentedly as upon their accustomed pastures. Small objects sailed on the flood here and there; Bagheera's milk-pan from the rear veranda bobbed amidst a fleet of apples shaken down in the orchard, while some wooden garden tools nudged a silk canoe-cushion.
In contrast to all this aquatic prospect, where the real lake had been there now lay some acres of ugly, oozing marsh; its expanse dotted with the bodies of dead water-creatures and such of Vere's young trout as had not been swept away by the outpouring flood. The dam was a mere pile of débris through which trickled a stream bearing no resemblance to the sparkling waterfall of yesterday. Already the sun's rays were drawing a rank, unwholesome vapor from the long-submerged surface.
We contemplated the ruin for a while, without words.
"Poor Drawls!" Phillida sighed at length. "All your work just rubbed out!"
"Never mind, Vere," I exclaimed impulsively. "We will put it all back in the same shape as it was."