“Just caught you in time, didn’t I?” he panted. “I looked around for you when that chatter-mill shut down—the rehearsal, I mean—but Sister Wheeler had me under her wing and I couldn’t get away in a hurry. When I did you had gone. I found this umbrella in the entry. I don’t know whose it is, but it is ours now. Hope the real owner doesn’t get too wet.”
He grinned broadly and lifted the commandeered umbrella over the new hat.
“Now we must move,” he went on. “It is going to rain like blazes. This is what my grand-dad would call a ‘tempest.’”
She took his arm and, partially sheltered by the umbrella, they hurried along the sidewalk. She imagined that eager eyes were watching them from each window they passed, but it was no time for finicky objections. The rain was pouring now and continued to increasingly pour. Her feet were growing damp, so were her skirts. Suddenly her escort stopped.
“Wait!” he ordered. “Great Scott! this isn’t a shower, it’s a flood. We must get under cover somewhere and wait till it lets up. You mustn’t drown—not until after that concert, anyhow. They would hang me if you did. Here! this will do. I don’t know who lives here, but they won’t put us out, I guess. Come!”
He led her in through a gate in a picket fence and they hurried up a weed-grown walk to a rickety front porch. Bob folded the umbrella and turned to the door. There was a glass-knobbed bell-pull at the side of the door and, before she could stop him, he had given it a tug.
“What are you doing that for?” she asked. “This house is empty. No one has lived in it for ever so long.”
He whistled. “You don’t mean it!” he exclaimed. “Why didn’t you tell me? Well, we’ll go on to the next one then.”
A vivid flash of lightning, almost instantly followed by a thunder peal which caused the windows in the old house to rattle, prevented her reply. The rain seemed to drop from the sky in sheets. It roared upon the shingled roof of the porch. She caught his arm.
“We can’t go out in this,” she said, nervously. “We must stay where we are—and wait.”