When it touched a garment it was forced through the texture. The three dark shadows moved on through the blackness.

Of a sudden there was a sound. It seemed a voice speaking to the wind. The wind's voice seemed a whisper to it. It seemed to begin in a murmur and to pass into a roar. It was a voice, but it was not articulate. It was a peal of thunder. When it ceased the wind seemed silent, as if it were rebuked. But still it blew. Noise makes silence! With too loud a noise we become deaf. After a cannon's, a small arm's report sounds like a tap on a window-pane.

At first, when the thunder ceased the wind seemed only to whisper "hush ;" but its voice grew again, and the whisper became hoarseness.

Then through the thick roof of cloud there was a rent. The clouds had brought "fire" to the birth-it was their parturition. The world was bright for a moment, and then the darkness leapt upon it again as if it were a wild beast kept at bay a moment from

its prey.

The light had blazed forth, and perished. Light had left blindness, as the noise left silence. Yet the light had shown these travellers clambering up the road to the moor. The next flash showed only one. It was Edward Fenwick; he was on the moor. Those who followed him were creeping under the brushwood. The man was nearest to him; the woman kept behind the man. This time the thunder seemed to stammer with eagerness of utterance. It seemed to have something to say, yet it said nothing. It came in a quick series of sharp reports. The lightning was nearer.

The sky is Nature's timbrel; she clashes clouds together. And all the other voices of the sky take up the strain and sing this chorus. It may be a dirge for some poor human being charred and blackened. Nature's organ is the forest with its million pipes, and the sky blows the bellows. Nature's harp is the sea, and the waves are the chords of it. The three journeyers of the night had crossed the moor. The lightning still flung a day upon the earth for a second, and then withdrew it, and night came back. The thunder had a sharp dry voice, and did not roll about the sky as it had done.

They were entering the wood which grew about the Highcliffe Crag. The first of the three was already in the shadow. It was a narrow path, that which led at the foot of the cliff. But the frequent flashes made it light. One could pick one's way over the water-courses which ran torrents. They had all passed into the shadow.

There was a sharp dry crash and a bright sudden flame; they seemed to come together. The fire had fallen from the zenith,

the sound was as short-lived as the light. Then the silence came. But it was broken by a dull sound, as if the earth were thundering. Something seemed to be stamping on the earth with iron feet. The woman crouched behind a tree. She felt the earth tremble. She knew not what had happened, or what nature had in store. The night was full of horrors. A flash shone out, and she saw the two men she had been following, one lay upon the ground, the other was bending over him. The curtain fell, nature was playing at tableaux. When the next flash came, there was only one man there. He lay upon the ground. She was cold. She felt as if she had died, and yet she was alive. She crept from where she lay along the footpath, she could not walk, she could only creep. She came upon the body ere she knew. She touched it. It was warm! The lightning shone. It shone on a ring which was on the hand she held. It shone on a face, but it was the face of the dead. The thunder that followed the flash drowned a cry. The darkness that followed hid a blanched face, which had fallen upon that of the dead man. Helen Asprey had fainted. She, fainting, kissed the dead.

BOOK V.

CHAPTER I.

SOME WEAKNESS IS STRENGTH.

CONVALESCENCE, the slow process of recovery, the clambering up the hill of health from the valley of disease, which leads into the darker valley of death, passed over quickly in Elton Asprey's

case.

He was well enough to sit up all day, and could even walk by himself into the little garden ground when the morning sun shone on it. He would sit there for hours, content to listen to the murmur of work from that great hive behind him, where men are storing up gold, not honey, in a hundred cells, of which death will rot them as it does the bees.

His life had changed somehow in a few weeks. He had found the world cruel, he had asked work and could find none, he had almost starved in the very centre of abundance. He had thought that all hearts were stone. He had fallen and wandered in the fairy world of dreams, and when he woke the task-master world was gone. He found a kind woman beside his bed. He found an old blind man ready to give him all the help and comfort he could.

His eyes used to follow Marie everywhere. Her father's sightless eyes were no check to that luxury. He blushed when he thought he was taking an advantage of the old man's infirmity. When Marie saw his eyes resting upon her, she sometimes smiled; she sometimes looked grave. When we are weak we will do many things that we cannot do when we are strong. Some of us will pray. So in weakness, there is an actual pleasure in following motion with the eye. If the motion is like that of a bird which slips through glossy summer air; if you feel that it is going to rest somewhere and sing; how exquisite is the luxury of such a gaze! The body is only a cage after all. There is a bird in it. We judge of the motions of the bird, of the fluttering of its wings, by the jolts of the cage. Sometimes the bird comes to the window, as it were, we see a smile or a frown. We can hear it sing, a voice is a part of the soul. And the soul is the bird.

Elton Asprey had greedy eyes in those days. He never could be content. He used to be sad in heart at rehearsal time. He thought, if she goes away she perhaps will not come again. Twice he made her promise to return. What luxuries strength deprives us of! Love gives us a chance of playing the child when we are grown up! What grown man has not at some seasons wished that he might lay his head in his mother's lap, and go to sleep? Oh! dignity, you won't let a man become as a little child. You have been as an angel with a flaming sword keeping many out of paradise.

But Elton Asprey was weak, and he could ask such a promise. Once before he was able to rise, he asked Marie to sing him to sleep. And he laid his hand on the coverlid that she might stroke it.

Is such weakness, weakness? If it gives us a license to speak truth, if it gives us an opportunity of drinking of the pleasant fountain of kind help, if it enables us to part with that sham coldness and insensibility, if it will let us shed sweet tears, if it will let us say humble prayers, it is strength. The so-called strength of manliness is coarseness. A fluted pillar will support a roof as well as rough-hewn stone. Many confound clumsiness with strength.

"You are very beautiful," he used to say to her.

One day he turned to her and said, "Will you let me tell you all my story?"

"May I hear it?" she asked.

"It will cure me and make me strong, if you will listen. I should like to tell you all."

It was a Sunday, and London seemed to be taking breath to roar again for six days. It was a spring day, as it were, summer

sent to be tried on. A snowdrop or two had put up their heads above the dark brown cold earth, into the bright warm golden sunshine. What it is to be born out of a grave! White clouds flew about like birds. The wind, a very child of a wind, carried them and played with them. It felt the softer for all the mighty winds. that had gone before. Winds are mysterics. No one can say where they come from. But come they do with wide wings. They are birds of prey, or they are gentle shepherds. They are angry tyrants, or they are moonlight lovers. They cast shadows as black as midnight, or they clear, a path-way for the blessed sun-light. They uproot forests, or they fertilize little quiet flowers. They scourge the sea into fury, and drive poor ships upon merciless rocks, or they ripple the water so that it may seem to be dancing guineas, and gently lead little boats over that great monster sea. They have a will which makes a trumpet of every key-hole, an organ of every forest, a timbrel of heavy rocks and great waves, and makes the whispering of river sedges swell into a shriek; or they are so bland that they coo in the woods like doves, they rustle the briers and reeds, and make no more noise than if a maiden walked in silk. Or they pass over the world without noise as if they walked on tip-toe. They can strike as if they were iron. They can pass without turning a sunflower from the sun. They have winter and summer to give away, in spite of the ruler sun. They can pipe for fierce dances of trampling waves. They can raise a forest of trees in the barren plain of the sea-trees whose stems are water, trees whose leaves are clouds. They are the horses of the heavens' artillery. They place those batteries of cloud; they arrange the acoustic principles of heaven for the thunder. They sweep as from the mouth of a furnace over a land, and leave a beaten path of blight. They carry a desert of sand, and choke men with earth's dust. They bring their leeches, the locusts, and a green land is left barren. They divide seas, and a chosen people walk where, even now, the fish swam. All these things do the winds do, and man stands under them, a spectator of all their mirth and anger,joy and sorrow-spite and kindness; of all their revels, their battles, their sleeps and their marches; of all the good they do, and the bad they bring. He tries to slip through their fingers to foreign lands to bring from their gardens fruits. He sets up a mill with sails to make the winds do a little work for him. But after all he feels that they are terrible. Even when he makes a play-fellow of the strong wind on a high common, he feels that he is playing with a wild beast. It may leap out from its unbarred cage in heaven and crush him.

He is thankful when it is at peace. It was at peace that early

spring day as Elton Asprey and Marie sat in the little garden. It was quiet and gentle while he told her all his story. She cried when he told her some parts of his history. She asked him some questions. When he had finished, she thought, she would rather he hadn't told her. There is a real pleasure in faith. Faith is so much grander than belief with reasons. It seems a huger grasp of the universe. It seems, like genius, to be a God gift, while reason seems to be learned in the world's school.

She listened to all he said. She wondered what was his duty. She only asked one question about Kate.

"Is Miss Musgrave very beautiful?" He answered, "Yes."

CHAPTER II.

PEOPLE OFTEN THINK THEY KNOW WHERE THE WIND COMES FROM.

OUT of that baby wind a giant grew. It shook the little villa in its hand. It kept folk awake all night. It peeled the slates of houses and tumbled down chimneys. It broke the branches from grand old trees and tore up saplings. It kept Marie awake for a time; and when she did sleep she dreamed of that awful wind in Dante, which hurls folk about for ever. She thought she was in the arms of a whirlwind, that she wished to reach something, but that it carried her away and wound her round.

She had tears wet on her check when she fell asleep that night.

One day Elton said to her, "May I write a play for you?" The idea pleased her and he began.

Every night he read what he had written; and she always praised it. She said, "When it is finished, I shall take it to our manager, and ask him to read it."

She used to appeal to her father, and he said it was good, but he qualified his praise by his modesty, for he always added, “But I am no judge."

One day Elton said, "I must go away."

"Why?" she asked. She would have wept if she had said

more.

"Why? Because I am strong. Because I have been a burden to you too long. I never can repay you."

"We are repaid."

"You are an angel."

"Stay," she said, as she laid her hand on his arm, as if to detain him.