“’Lie down, Allie; let me close the other blinds; don’t look out any longer.’

“Our mother came in.

“‘I came to see if the windows were all down,’ she said; ’it will rain in a moment’; and she hurried away, and I heard her closing, one after another, the windows that had been all day open.

“Alice lay for a long time quietly.  The storm uprose with fearful might; it shook the house in its passing grasp, and I sat by this table, listening to the music wrought out of the thunderous echoes.

“‘Couldn’t we have a window open?’ Alice asked; ’I feel stifled in here’; and she went across the room and lifted the sash before I was aware.

“I looked around, when I heard the noise.  The same instant there came a blinding, dazzling light; then, that awful vacuous rattle in the throat of thunder that tells it comes in the name of Death the destroyer.

“‘Oh, Allie, come away!’ I screamed.

“In obedience to my wish, she leaned towards me; but, oh, her face!  I caught her, ere she fell, even.  I sent out the wings of my voice, but no one heard me, no one came.  I could not lift her in my arms, so I laid her upon the floor, and ran down.

“‘Go to Alice,—­the lightning!’ was all I could say, and it was enough.  I heard groans before I gained the street.

“My pale, silent sister was stronger than the storm which flapped its wings around me and threatened to take me to its eyry; but it did not; it permitted me to gain Doctor Percival’s door.  I was dazzled with the lightning, only my brain was distinct with ‘its skeleton of woe,’ when I found myself in your father’s house.

“I could not see the faces that were there.  I asked for Doctor Percival.  Some one answered, ‘He is not come home.  What has happened?’ and Mary ran forward in alarm.

“‘It is lightning!  Oh, come!’ was all that I could utter; and with me there went out into the pouring rain every soul that was there when I went in.

“‘She is dead; there is nothing to be done.’

“Three hours after the stroke, these words came.  Then I looked up.  Alice, with her little white face of perfect beauty, lay upon that bed.  Thunder-storms would never more make her tremble, never awake to fear the spirit gone.  It was Doctor Percival from whom these fateful words came.  I had had so much hope!  In very desperation of feeling, I strove to look up to his face.  My eyes were arrested before they reached him.

“‘By what?’ did you ask?”

Her long silence had incited me to question, and she turned her face to me, and slowly said,—­

“By the Lightning of Life.

“Two sisters, in one night,—­one unto Death, the other unto Life.  Beside Doctor Percival was standing one.  I do not know what he was like, I cannot tell you; but, believe me, it is solemnly true, that, that instant, this human being flashed into my heart and soul.  I saw, and felt, and have heard the rolling thunder that followed the flash to this very hour.  It was very hard, over my Alice.  If I had only been she, how much, how much happier it would have been!—­and yet it must have been wiser.  She could not have endured to the end.  She would have failed in the bitterness of the trial.