“How black the sky grows,” said the girl, joining Gabriel in the window-seat.
“A storm threatens.”
“And the wind prophesies.”
Into the room a transient stream of sunlight poured. It burned in the girl’s hair and upon the flowers in her bosom, seeming to enhance the grim promise of the sky.
“What will you do?” she asked.
“Foul weather is nothing to me.”
“You must stay here till the storm has passed.”
“Perhaps,” said the man, looking at the clouds.
The west grew lurid. A tense silence weighed upon the world, a silence so solemn that the very trees might have stood watching for some miraculous portent in the sky. The laurels and the grass shone with a vivid green in the mysterious light. The purple clouds in the west had taken fire and were fringed with flame.
The wind rose. They heard it crying far away upon the hills, deep, hoarse, and distant. It gathered clamorous in the air, a great, solemn moan that seemed to surge from the east like the cavern cry of the dead. The trees stooped, swayed, tossed as in torture. Rain followed with the rattle of a cataract, a heavy mist shot through with the fiery spears of the setting sun. Lightning gleamed on the hills. The sky grew great with thunder. In the onrush of twilight the trees struggled in a tornado of wind and rain, while the house seemed to quake with the uproar of the storm.