It was two hours later when Viola started to leave the florist’s. The storm was raging with all the malignant intensity of driving rain and a wind that lay in wait at corners and sprang upon the wayfarer. She made part of her journey on the electric car, but the long climb up the hill had to be accomplished on foot. About this high point the wind met few obstacles, and swept by, shouting hoarsely in the joy of its freedom.
It played with Viola like a cat with a mouse—at one moment swept her forward in a sail-like spread of skirt, at the next turned upon her, buffeting her furiously back against the streaming walls, tearing at her hat, driving the rain into her face, down her neck, up her sleeves. It seized her umbrella and whisked it this way and that, while she held its handle and helplessly followed its eccentric course. When half-way up the hill she was forced to shut it, and then, angry with her for thus terminating its sport, the wind concentrated its spiteful anger upon her.
It blew steadily in her face, except at the moments when she crossed an intersecting street. Then it seemed to blow from all points at once, seizing her and shaking her, whirling her about, throwing her against a gate or into the drenched, yielding leafage of a hedge, and then creeping up behind her and beating against her with a force that almost sent her on her face. Her clothes clung to her, saturated and heavy, confining her limbs with their clammy hold. The water streamed off her hat and oozed out of her shoes. Once she was forced to take shelter on a door-step, under the jutting roof of a balcony. From this she crept onward, clinging close to the walls, down which water ran in wide rills, and where long strands of creepers struck her with their wet leaves. Once in the cottage, she threw her clothes out of the window on the balcony, and crept shivering to bed.
The storm wore itself away in the course of the week, to be followed by an interval of bright weather, and then by other storms. There were short ones, when the rain came and went with a sudden rolling up of clouds and breaks of blue, and the sun burst out hopefully and licked up the moisture. There were long ones, when the rain fell in warm, rustling floods, copious but gentle, that assuaged the earth’s thirst and poured down in silvery lances from a low, swollen sky. There were blustering ones, that lashed the windows and threshed against the pavements, flooded the sewers, and tried to force an entrance through opened casements and doors left ajar. And then the great, conscientious, businesslike ones, which went on day after day, oblivious of anything but their duty to thoroughly saturate the dry ground far down through its parched crust to where the seeds lay waiting for the moisture that was to give them life.
So the time wore on till Christmas began to loom close at hand, and all the town was agog with its holiday shopping.
Maud Gault and Letitia splashed about the dripping streets in a hired coupé, which returned from every trip full of packages. Mortimer went alone to Shreve’s and bought his wife and sister-in-law costly surprises. John ordered his presents,—there were a good many of them,—all but the beautiful turquoise clasp for Letitia, which he selected himself. Tod gave his mother money to buy his sisters suitable gifts, but took with him a friend of acknowledged taste when he went to choose the necklet of small diamonds and emeralds that was to carry his greetings to the fortunate Miss Mason.
On Christmas eve Mr. and Mrs. Mortimer Gault gave a large dinner for their sister, whose engagement to Mr. Theodore McCormick had been announced a short time before. Society had often predicted this finale to the attachment which it was known Mr. Theodore McCormick had long cherished for Miss Mason. Society did not concern itself about Miss Mason’s sentiments on the subject. That Mr. Theodore McCormick was the only son of Jerry McCormick, one of the richest of the bonanza men, was supposed to be sufficient ground for Miss Mason to have been pleased and flattered by his choice of herself. Society regarded her as a very lucky girl.
John Gault had gone to this dinner reluctantly. The thought of Letitia’s marriage with Tod was as repulsive to him after a month had familiarized his mind with it, as it had been on the day Letitia told him of it. That the large-hearted girl, whose simple honesty of nature he had learned long ago to respect and rely on, was to give the freshness and beauty of her life to the feeble and half-bred son of a day-laborer, seemed to him a sacrilege worthy of the days of Molech. He had seen little of Letitia lately. When he had been at his brother’s she had generally been absent, staying at the McCormicks’, or dining elsewhere with Tod. Whatever her feelings for her fiancé were, Gault saw that, with her unswerving obedience to convention and duty, she was evidently doing her best to understand and grow fond of him.
To-night, however, at the dinner, he saw that a change had taken place in her. It was so subtle, so illusive, so hard to define, that for a space he watched her surreptitiously, wondering what it was. Yet even as he shook hands with her in the moment of greeting, he saw it in her face, he felt it radiating from her, like the warm individual atmosphere that is said to encompass us and contain the color of our personality.