Toward the end of that week, the weather which had been thickening to a storm, brought us to one of those thunderous London days, full of a stifling murk that might have been breathed out by the nostrils of the greasy, hurrying snake that went by in the bed of the river. Inconsequential lightnings flashed in the smoky vault, from every quarter of which rolled unrelated thunder.
Helmeth came over from Mr. Shane's office in London Wall; the need we had of being together was oppressive like the day which, when we had sought it in the Park, we could hear like some great monster bellowing for its mate. We went out and walked about for a time under the trees, fancying the relief of freshness in the green obscurity that under the ranked trunks, thickened to blackness. No one was about but a few belated nursery maids, scurrying in silhouette against the pale glow of the light pinned down and imprisoned under the thick cloud of foliage. We were on the Broad Walk, when suddenly a wind tore loose in the firmament. It made a whirling chaos of the murk, it wrung the treetops, but the air along the ground was stagnant as a cistern. Now and then a few great drops spattered on the leaves of the limes. Over a quarter of a mile from us, near the Alexandria gate, the tension of the day snapped suddenly in flame, a bolt had shattered one of the great trees. Straight across the grass toward us the bolt sped like a ball of light. It skimmed the ground knee high, flame points on its edges, flickered viciously as it drove at us.
There was no time for anything. Helmeth cried out to me once and I stepped within the circle of his arms; we could hear the fire ball sizzling as it cleared the grass; within a yard of us it went out in a flare of gas and a crack like thunder. Suddenly buckets of rain were precipitated on us, we could hear the slap of them on the pavement as we ran.
I was crying hysterically by the time we came to my room in a cab. I remember Helmeth trying to rid me of my wet things and my clinging to him crying.
"Oh, my dear, my dear, it was so near, so near, I thought I was to lose you before I had had you—before I had had you at all!"
"No, no ... not that, Olivia, not that!" His arms were around me and all my life up to that moment was no more to me than a path which led up to those arms. I remember that ... and the world dissolving in the wash of the rain outside ... and the lift of his breast; and deep under all, old, unimagined instincts reared their heads and bayed at the voice of their master....
CHAPTER IV
After the evening of the storm we talked no more of marriage for a while, and about a week later I went over to Paris ostensibly to shop, and was joined there by Mr. Garrett on the way to Italy. I suppose that Italy must always lie like some lovely sunken island at the bottom of all passionate dreams, from which at the flood it may arise; the air of it is charged with subtle essences of romance. One supposes Italy must be organized for the need of lovers. Nothing occurred there to break the film of our enchanted bubble. For a month we kept to the hill towns and to Venice, where we could go about in the conspicuous privacy of a gondola, and all that time we met nobody we had ever known.
It was all so easily managed—we had to think of the girls, of course—no one seeing our registered names side by side, Mrs. Thomas Bettersworth, New York, and Helmeth Garrett, Chilicojote, Mexico, would have thought of connecting them. Helmeth attended to all his business correspondence as though he were still in London, and nobody expected to hear from me in any case.