“Come, Nella, we mustn’t be dismayed by the first difficulty, let us go on; we are in a Christian country, any how, and by-and-by we must come to some cottage, where the people will give us shelter from the storm to-night, and to-morrow will be a new day.”
And so, with a smile in the face of frowning Fortune, she struck into a road that crossed the rail way track and hurried onward.
She knew not where she was bound. She knew not where in all the north Allworth Abbey, the goal of her desires, might be situated. She knew not even whether she might be within five or ten miles of the place. In setting out to seek it she had taken the general northern route as far as the train would carry her for her money, trusting to the chapter of accidents to find the rest of her way to her destination.
“It must be within a circuit of twenty miles, I should think; and somebody about here must know something about it. So to-night I must seek shelter from the storm, and to-morrow inquire my way to the Abbey,” she thought, as she trudged onward through the gathering darkness.
Low mutterings of thunder and large drops of rain warned her to hurry her steps. She ran on, looking eagerly to the right and left to spy out some wayside cottage in which she might find refuge from the impending storm. But the darkness was now so thick that she could scarcely see her own road.
Suddenly the clouds were cleft asunder by a stroke of forked lightning, that blazed from horizon to horizon, making the night for one instant as bright as noonday. This was immediately followed by a reverberating crash of thunder and a heavy fall of rain.
Annella stood still, but not appalled; for in that one instantaneous glare of light she had seen on a rising ground far to the westward the white chimneys of a mansion-house. And though the whole scene was again swallowed up in darkness, she kept the direction of the house in her “mind’s eye,” and bent her steps towards it, trusting in the frequent flashes of lightning to correct her mistakes and guide her on her way.
Her way lay up and down hill through this dreadful night of storm, of blinding lightning, of deafening thunder, and of drowning rain. Confused by the warring elements, saturated with wet, and exhausted by fatigue, Annella yet held on her way towards the mansion upon which she had fixed as her house of refuge.
As she approached the neighborhood of this dwelling she grew independent of the lightning as a guide, for in the darkness between the flashes she could see the windows of the mansion, which seemed to be illuminated from within as for a festival.
And from the moment that she found she could keep the house constantly in view, she toiled on towards it hopefully, saying to herself: