The darkness and shortness of the days was intensified by the onslaught of a great storm; one of those giant overwhelmings when it seems that the canopy of heaven is being crushed down upon one’s own little corner of this earth, and that all the winds and all the waters of the universe are gathered beneath it to annihilate one insignificant segment of the world.  On Monday morning, Christian saw her father and mother start, too agitated by their coming journey to have a spare thought for sentiment; too much beset by the fear of what they might lose, their keys, their sandwiches, their dressing-boxes, to shed a tear for what they were losing, and had lost.  And on Monday afternoon with the early darkness the storm began.  There came first a little run of wind round the house, like a cavalry patrol spying out the land.  There followed complete stillness; then a few scattered drops of rain fell, and ceased; and then, with a heavy, travelling roar, the wind came rushing up the valley.  It thundered in the cavernous chimneys of Mount Music; it bawled and whooped at the windows, and shook them with a human fury, as though it were life or death to it to get in, as though it were maddened by the failure of its surprise attack.  Christian and her ancient servitors ran from room to room, barring shutters, fastening doors, the draughts down the long passages snatching at the candle flames, the old man and woman full of forebodings and of reminiscences of former storms, that came to Christian in broken scraps, through the rattle of windows and the shaking clatter of doors within the house, and the shrieking rage of the wind outside.  She sat up late, sorting and arranging things in her room.  She had none of the fears that might, for another, have filled the empty house with visitants from another world, and might have taught her to listen for footsteps in the echoing passages and knocks on the shaking doors.  She had always lived on the borderland, and was naturalised in both spheres, but to-night, the voices that had so often given her help, were, when she most needed help, silent.

“I have nothing left now,” she said to herself, “but memories, hungering memories—­”

She was to leave Mount Music on Wednesday, and on Thursday, Larry was to be married to Tishy Mangan.  What room was there for phantom fears when these things were certainties?  What spectre from the other world has power to break a heart?

Deep in the night there was a lull, a strange moment of arrest, that endured for scarcely as long as that one could count ten, and then, with the returning tempest, the rain that had been pent behind it, was hurled upon the world.  All that night, and all the following day, the rain was like a wall about the house.  It was flung in masses against the windows, as buckets of water are flung on a deck.  To look forth was as though one looked through a dense sheet of moving ice.  Gutters, eave-shoots, tanks, overflowed.  The sorely-tried roof was mastered,