“That’s how I want you to think of Him.  A Father’s love.  Nothing strange nor new about it.  Just what you used to be thinking as a boy, coming home to Father.”

“I can’t remember my father,” said Dale simply.  “He died when I was a baby, and mother married again.  I only knew a stepfather.”

“Then you’ll know the real thing now, if you join us.”  Mr. Osborn beamed cheerfully.  “Understand, I don’t press you.  Why should I?  The pressure behind you is not of this earth; and if it’s there, as I think it is, you’ll no more resist it than the iron bolt resists the steam-ram.  But what’s steam and horse-power?” And he beamed all over his face.  “This is ten thousand angel-power to the square inch.”

The rain began as Dale walked up the village street, in which no light except that of the public lamps was now showing.  It fell sharply as he emerged into the open country, and then abruptly ceased.  The odor of dust that has been partially moistened rose from the roadway; some dead leaves scurried in the ditch with a sound of small animals running for shelter; and he felt a heavy, tepid air upon his face, as if some large invisible person was breathing on him.

Then the heavens opened, and a flood of light came pouring down.  The thunder seemed simultaneous with the flash.  It was a crashing roar that literally shook the ground.  It was as if, without prelude or warning, every house in England had fallen, every gun fired, and every powder-magazine blown up.  Dale stood still, trying to steady himself after the shock, and ascertaining that his eyes had not been blinded nor the drums of his ears broken.

Then he walked on slowly, watching the storm.  The lightning flooded and forked, the thunder boomed and banged; and it seemed to Dale that the whole world had been turned upside down.  When one looked up at the illuminated sky, one seemed to be looking down at a mountainous landscape.  The clouds, rent apart, torn, and shattered, were like masses of high hills, inky black on the summits, with copper-colored precipices and glistening purple slopes; and in remote depths of the valleys, where there should have been lakes of water, there were lakes of fire.  In the intervals between the flashes, when suddenly the sky became dark, one had a sensation that the earth had swung right again, and that it was now under one’s feet as usual instead of being over one’s head.

Dale plodding along thought of all he had read about thunder-storms.  It was quite true, what he said to Norah.  Lightning strikes the highest object.  That was why trees had got such a bad name for themselves; although, as a fact, you were often a jolly sight safer under a tree than out in the open.  Salisbury Plain, he had read, was the most dangerous place in England; for the reason that, because of its bareness, it made a six-foot man as conspicuous, upstanding an object as a church tower or a factory chimney would be elsewhere.  And he thought that if any cattle had been left out in those wide flat fields near the Baptist Chapel, they were now in great peril.  Mav’s cows were all safe under cover.