An invitation was never accepted with more cheerful willingness.  It was arranged that Mrs. Harding, Miss Harding and I should arrive at Oak Cliff with the auto at about four o’clock Tuesday afternoon.

We were to start from Woodvale at half after one o’clock, so as to have plenty of time.  That Fate, which is always prying into and disarranging the plans of us poor mortals, interfered with our arrangements an hour before the time fixed for our departure.  The visitors who were to arrive in the evening came shortly after noon.  It was exasperating.

I pictured myself making that long trip alone, and cursed the chattering arrivals who had the bad form to anticipate the hour set for their welcome.  There were three of them, and I noticed that they were of mature years.

I sat glumly watching them and heartily wishing that the train which brought them had been blocked for an hour or two, when Miss Harding came smilingly towards me.

“Mamma cannot go,” she said.

“And you?” I asked, hardly daring to hope for the best.

“They seemed glad to excuse me, Jacques Henri,” she laughed.

I have no doubt I grinned like a Cheshire cat.  I refrained from telling the abominable falsehood that I was sorry Mrs. Harding could not go with us, and an hour later the huge touring car rolled smoothly away from the Woodvale club house, its front seat occupied by a supremely happy gentleman of the name of Smith, and by his side a supremely pretty young lady who waved her hand to the elderly group on the veranda.

I had been so absorbed in the unfolding of the incidents just narrated that I took no note of the weather or of anything else.  For a month or more the weather has been so uniformly fine that we had come to accept the succession of warm but cloudless days as a matter of course.

When I was a boy my father drilled into me a knowledge of the visible signs of impending changes in meteorological conditions.  As I became older the study of the warnings displayed in the sky and in the indescribable variations in the feel of the air possessed a fascination for me.  During the early years after the formation of the club the members jested me on account of my predilection for weather forecasting, but the uniform accuracy of these guesses commanded their surprise and subsequently won their respect.

Chilvers and others sometimes call me “Old Prog.  Smith,” and I am more proud of that pleasantry than of some others.

There was not a breath of air stirring.  The atmosphere seemed stagnant, like a pool on which the sun has beat during rainless weeks.  The dried tops of the swamp grass and reeds pointed motionless to the heat-quivering sky.  The dust cast up by our car hung over the road like a ribbon of fog.

The forest to our left shut off a view of the western sky, but I felt sure that the clouds of an approaching storm were already marshalled along its horizon.  Then we shot out into a clearing and I took one swift look.