Gordon made no reply. His eyes were focused on a purple stain of storm mounting to the zenith, like some caryatid upholding a caldron of steam, all ink and cloud color, while before it slaty masses of vapor fled like monstrous behemoths, quirted into some gigantic sky-inclosure.
Dallas pulled the window shut.
With the action, unheralded as doom, a great violet sword of lightning wrote the autograph of God across the sky, and a shock of thunder, instantaneous and crashing like near ordnance, shook the walls of the palace. It loosed the vicious pandemonium of the tropic air into tornado, sudden and appalling.
While the echoes of that detonation still reverberated, into the room, as though hurled from the wing of the unleashed wind, came Mary Shelley, drenched with the rain, bareheaded, gasping.
“Shelley’s boat has not returned!” she wailed. “He is at sea in the storm. Oh, I am afraid—afraid—afraid!”
Teresa entered at the moment with a frightened face, loose-haired and pale, and Mary ran to her, sobbing.
Gordon had turned from the window, but his countenance was void and expressionless. “Shelley?” he repeated vacantly, and sat down heavily in the nearest chair.
Teresa suddenly put the arms of the weeping girl aside and ran to him.
“Gordon!” she cried, as Dallas hurried forward in alarm. “Gordon, what is it?”
“England—Teresa—” he said. Then his head fell forward against her breast.