The lightning was about them, and they raced to the booming of the thunder.  Heavy raindrops began to fall, and the wind was a power to drive the riders on.  Its voice shrilled above the diapason of the thunder; the forest swung to its long cry.  When the horses turned from the wide into the narrow road, they could no longer go abreast.  Mirza took the lead, and the bay fell a length behind.  The branches now hid the sky; between the flashes there was Stygian gloom, but when the lightning came it showed far aisles of the forest.  There was the smell of rain upon dusty earth, there was the wine of coolness after heat, there was the sense of being borne upon the wind, there was the leaping of life within the veins to meet the awakened life without.  Audrey closed her eyes, and wished to ride thus forever.  Haward, too, traveling fast through mist and rain a road whose end was hidden, facing the wet wind, hearing the voices of earth and sky, felt his spirit mount with the mounting voices.  So to ride with Love to doom!  On, and on, and on!  Left behind the sophist, the apologist, the lover of the world with his tinsel that was not gold, his pebbles that were not gems!  Only the man thundering on,—­the man and his mate that was meant for him since time began!  He raised his face to the strife above, he drew his breath, his hand closed over the hand of the woman riding with him.  At the touch a thrill ran through them both; had the lightning with a sword of flame cut the world from beneath their feet, they had passed on, immortal in their happiness.  But the bolts struck aimlessly, and the moment fled.  Haward was Haward again; he recognized his old acquaintance with a half-humorous, half-disdainful smile.  The road was no longer a road that gleamed athwart all time and space; the wind had lost its trumpet tone; Love spoke not in the thunder, nor seemed so high a thing as the lit heaven.  Audrey’s hand was yet within his clasp; but it was flesh and blood that he touched, not spirit, and he was glad that it was so.  For her, her cheek burned, and she hid her eyes.  She had looked unawares, as by the lightning glare, into a world of which she had not dreamed.  Its portals had shut; she rode on in the twilight again, and she could not clearly remember what she had seen.  But she was sure that the air of that country was sweet, she was faint with its beauty, her heart beat with violence to its far echoes.  Moreover, she was dimly aware that in the moment when she had looked there had been a baptism.  She had thought of herself as a child, as a girl; now and for evermore she was a woman.

They left the forest behind, and came to open fields where the tobacco had been beaten to earth.  The trees now stood singly or in shivering copses.  Above, the heavens were bare to their gaze, and the lightning gave glimpses of pale castles overhanging steel-gray, fathomless abysses.  The road widened, and the bay was pushed by its rider to Mirza’s side.  Fields of corn where the long blades wildly