The drops came in ever-increasing frequency, cold as ice on her hand.  She heard them rustling in the spruce boughs; and far in the forest she discerned the first whine of the wakening wind.  The sound of the rain was no longer soft.  It swelled and grew, and all at once the wind caught it and swept it into her face.  And now the whole forest moaned and soughed under the sweep of the wind.

There is no sound quite like the beat of a hard rain on dense forest.  It has no startling discords, but rather a regular cadence as if the wood gods were playing melodies in the minor on giant instruments,—­melodies remembered from the first, unhappy days of the earth and on instruments such as men have never seen.  But this was never a melody to fill the heart with joy.  It touches deep chords of sorrow in the most secret realms of the spirit.  The rain song grew and fell as the gusts of the wind swept it, and the rock walls of the cliff swam in clouds of spray.

The storm could not help but bring Ben to camp, she thought.  At least she did not fear that he would lose his way:  he knew every trail and ridge for miles around the cave.  Even such pressing, baleful darkness as this could not bewilder him.  She went back to her cot to wait his coming.

The minutes seemed interminable.  Time had never moved so slowly before.  She tried to lie still, to relax; then to direct her thought in other channels; but all of these meandering streams flowed back into the main current which was Ben.  Yet it was folly to worry about him; any moment she would hear his step at the edge of the forest.  But the night was so dark, and the storm so wild.  A half-hour dragged its interminable length away.

Her uneasiness was swiftly developing into panic.  Just to-day she was willing to risk his life for her freedom:  it was certainly folly now to goad herself to despair by dwelling on his mysterious absence.  It might speed the passing minutes if she got up and found some work to do about the cave; but she simply had no heart for it.  Once she sat up, only to lie down again.

The moments dragged by.  Surely he would have had time to reach camp by now.  The storm neither increased nor decreased; only played its mournful melodies in the forest.  The song of the rain was despairing,—­low mournful notes rising to a sharp crescendo as the fiercer gusts swept it into the tree tops.  The limbs murmured unhappily as they smote together; and a tall tree, swaying in the wind, creaked with a maddening regularity.  She was never so lonely before, so darkly miserable.

“I want him to come,” her voice suddenly spoke aloud.  It rang strangely in the gloomy cave.  “I want him to come back to me.”

She felt no impulse for the words.  They seemed to speak themselves.  Presently she sat erect, her heart leaping with inexpressible relief, at the sound of a heavy tread at the edge of the glade.

The steps came nearer, and then paused.  She sprang to her feet and went to the mouth of the cave.  A silence that lived between the beating rain and the complaining wind settled down about her.  Her eyes could not pierce the darkness.