There was a flash of lightning that seemed to play all about the girl running swiftly down the walk; a crash of thunder that seemed to make every window pane in the house rattle in echo, and a few, big, splashing drops of rain fell.
Arethusa stretched her arms high and stood on tiptoe to meet them. She shook her hair loose from its plait and threw back her head, loving it all—the wind and the dark sky and the tense feeling of readiness for the storm with which everything seemed charged—with an almost pagan joy. She even began a dance, a fantastic sort of lonely quadrille (if it could be given any special name), there on the flagged walk by the end of the house.
"'Thusa!"
The call came very faint and far away.
Then—"'Thusa!"
Louder this time, and much nearer, but Arethusa heeded it not if she heard; her dance continued uninterrupted. She swayed like a tall lily to the wind, with a few little steps one way and then a few little steps the other; holding out her cotton skirts; her hair blown all about her like a great, red cloud. There was something elfin, something wild and woodsy, in her manner of dancing; the nymph whose name she bore might so have welcomed a storm in her woods of ancient Greece.
Then—"A——r—e-thusa!"
And Miss Eliza Redfield's own energetic little person, as trig and trim as a tiny ship with all sails closely reefed, even in this boisterous wind, bore down upon her niece. Miss Eliza's grey crown of glory, parted in the middle with precision and to the exactitude of a hair, was totally unruffled and remained drawn down across her forehead in smooth, satiny bands of an evenness and rigidity which no other hair, save Miss Eliza's, could possibly have.
She pushed her shiny glasses to the end of her sharp, little nose and over them surveyed the disheveled maiden before her.
"What are you doing?" she asked crisply.