'Don't fancy it at all,' she said, laughing. 'It is a very small and very natural incident of one's life here. Look back, Mr. Elsmere; the rain has beaten us!'
He looked back and saw the great Pike over Shanmoor village blotted out in a moving deluge of rain. The quarry opposite on the mountain side gleamed green and vivid against the ink-black fell; some clothes hanging out in the field below the church flapped wildly hither and thither in the sudden gale, the only spot of white in the prevailing blackness; children with their petticoats over their heads ran homewards along the road the walking party had just quitted; the stream beneath, spreading broadly through the fields, shivered and wrinkled under the blast. Up it came, and the rain mists with it. In another minute the storm was beating in their faces.
'Caught!' cried Elsmere, in a voice almost of jubilation. 'Let me help you into your cloak, Miss Leyburn.'
He flung it round her, and struggled into his own mackintosh. The vicar in front of them turned and waved his hand to them in laughing despair, then hurried after the others, evidently with the view of performing for them the same office Elsmere had just performed for Catherine.
Robert and his companion struggled on for a while in a breathless silence against the deluge, which seemed to beat on them from all sides. He walked behind her, sheltering her by his tall form and his big umbrella as much as he could. His pulses were all aglow with the joy of the storm. It seemed to him that he rejoiced with the thirsty grass over which the rain streams were running, that his heart filled with the shrunken becks as the flood leapt along them. Let the elements thunder and rave as they pleased. Could he not at a word bring the light of that face, those eyes, upon him? Was she not his for a moment in the rain and the solitude, as she had never been in the commonplace sunshine of their valley life?
Suddenly he heard an exclamation, and saw her run on in front of him. What was the matter? Then he noticed for the first time that Rose, far ahead, was still walking in her cotton dress. The little scatterbrain had, of course, forgotten her cloak. But, monstrous! There was Catherine stripping off her own, Rose refusing it. In vain. The sister's determined arms put it round her. Rose is enwrapped, buttoned up before she knows where she is, and Catherine falls back, pursued by some shaft from Rose, more sarcastic than grateful, to judge by the tone of it.
'Miss Leyburn, what have you been doing?'
'Rose had forgotten her cloak,' she said briefly. 'She has a very thin dress on, and she is the only one of us that takes cold easily.'
'You must take my mackintosh,' he said at once.
She laughed in his face.