The two in the window-seat had drawn closer as they watched the sky. There was a long silence between them. Once Joan’s hand touched Gabriel’s. They drew apart suddenly with a quick glance into each other’s eyes.
“I love such a storm,” said the girl.
“It is grand. I have often thought that I should like to end my life at such an hour as this.”
“More so than in a golden twilight?”
“It is mere superstition on my part,” he added. “Yet I have had a kind of presentiment that life will end for me in tragedy.”
“Why do you think that?” she asked, with a sudden glance into his eyes.
“Because the death is often an echo of the life, a storm-cry or a peaceful noise of flutes.”
The dusk had deepened rapidly; the rain still rushed upon the earth. The lightning had grown fitful in the west with a sullen roar of distant thunder. The wind had passed and was gone, as though some grim company of the damned had swept gibbering athwart the sky. There was no sound now save the rattle of the rain upon the laurels.
The dusk thickened to an eerie gloom. In the window-seat the man and the girl crouched like two silent children. Joan’s face was white as death in the dark; her eyes shone with a peculiar brilliancy; now and again there was a faint glimmer of light upon her hair.
“You cannot go yet,” she said.