"Thank you for telling me all this, father," I said; "I like you better and better. But in one way the cases aren't parallel. In Lucy's case there is no other man."
"Not yet," said my father; "but when a woman no longer loves her husband, look out for her. She has become a huntress—she is a lovely sloop-of-war that has cleared her decks for action.… Are you ready?"
I slipped my arm through my father's and we went downstairs together.
"I'm sorry you're mixed up in this," he said; "but you couldn't go when she made a point of your staying. I'm obliged to you for telling me."
XIV
It grew very warm during the evening and windy. By bedtime there was a hot, lifeless gale blowing from the southeast. Now and then the moon shone out brightly through the smother of tearing clouds, and was visible for a moment in all her glory, only to be submerged the next moment and blotted out. About two o'clock single raindrops began to splash so loudly on the veranda roof just outside my window that the noise waked me; after that I only slept fitfully, and my ears were never free from the loud roaring of the tropic rain that began presently to fall upon Aiken. I dreamed that somebody had stolen the Great Lakes and while being hotly pursued had dropped them. All day it rained like that, and all the following night, and only let up a little the afternoon of the second day. I got into an oilskin then and walked out to the Fultons'.
Theirs was a nervous household. Jock and Hurry confined indoors for nearly two days had had too little exercise and too many good things to eat. They were quite cross and irrepressible. John had the fidgets. He couldn't even stay in the same room for more than a minute, and he wouldn't even try sitting down for a change. Lucy had had to give up at least a dozen things that required dry weather and sunshine. She seemed to take the rain as something directed particularly against herself by malicious persons. Evelyn, also cross and nervous, was on the point of retiring to her own room to write letters. Just then Dawson Cooper telephoned to know if she cared to take a little walk in the rain and she accepted with alacrity.
"It's gotten so that he only has to whistle," said Lucy petulantly, when Evelyn had gone. "I think she's made up her mind to be landed."
Fulton came and went. Every now and then he dropped on the piano-stool for a few moments and made the instrument roar and thunder; once he played something peaceful and sad and even, in which one voice with tears in it ran away from another.