"Are you afraid?" he asked her, and she shook her head.
With a roar and a rush the storm was upon them. For a few moments they were in the midst of chaos. The air was full of flying things, and the branches crashed and fell.
To Bettina, emotionally tense, the real world had disappeared. She was a disembodied spirit, floating through infinite space with another spirit as joyous, as exalted, as triumphant as her own.
When he asked her again, "Are you afraid?" and she again shook her head, it came to her, suddenly, that she was not afraid because she was with him. She felt no wonder that it was so. In this wild world there was no place for wonder. She and Justin were laughing madly as they raced. Her hair, loosed by the wind, streamed out behind her. Once it caught on a button of Justin's coat, and held her so close to him that, when he unwound it, she felt the quickened beating of his heart.
As they again sped on, she felt as if never before had she been alive in such a radiant wonderful sense.
"Are you afraid?" he asked for the third time, bending down to catch her answer.
"It's glorious," she panted. Then as the rain came, he shielded her with his arm, and shouted:
"We'll have to make a dash through the open; here's the house ahead!"
The great house was closed and deserted, but they found a cloistered porch from which they could look out on the storm.
Below them the trees were whipped and bent by the gale. Against the horizon the sea rose like a great gray wall. Straining their eyes, they could catch a glimmer of the captain's yellow coat on the strip of sand.