An hour or so later he lifted his eyes from the printed page at a distant boom of thunder.  The advanced edge of a black cloudbank rolling swiftly up from the east was already dimming the brassy glare of the sun.  He watched the swift oncoming of the storm.  With astonishing rapidity the dark mass resolved itself into a gray, obscuring streak of rain riven by vivid flashes of lightning.  Carr laid down his book and refilled his pipe while he gazed on this common phenomenon of the dog-days.  It swept up and passed over the village of Lone Moose as a sprinkling wagon passes over a city street.  The downpour was accompanied by crashing detonations that sent the village dogs howling to cover.  With the same uncanny swiftness of gathering so it passed, leaving behind a pleasant coolness in the air, clean smells of the washed earth arising.  The sun blazed out again.  A million rain-pearls hung glistening on the blades of grass in the meadow before Sam Carr’s house.

With the passing of the thunder shower, before Carr left off his contemplation of the freshened beauty of meadow and woods, a man and a woman emerged from the spruce forest on the farther side of the meadow.

They walked a little way in the open, stopped for a minute, facing each other.  Their conversation ended with a sudden quick gesture by the man.  Turning, they came on again toward Carr’s house.  Sam Carr’s clear gray eyes lit up.  The ghost of a smile hovered about his bearded lips.  He watched them approach with that same quizzical expression, a mixture, if one gauged his look aright, of pleasure and pride and expectation.

They were young as years go, the pair that walked slowly up to the cabin.  The man was certainly still in his twenties, of medium height, compactly muscular, a good-looking specimen of pure Anglo-Saxon manhood.  The girl was a flower in perfect bloom, fresh-colored, slender and pliant as a willow, with all of the willow’s grace in every movement.  For all the twenty-odd years between them, and the gulf of sex differentiation, there was in her glance and bearing much of the middle-aged man who sat on the porch with a book across his knees and a clay pipe in his mouth.  It did not lie in facial resemblance.  It was more subtle than likeness of feature.  Perhaps it was because of their eyes, alike deep gray, wide and expressive, lifted always to meet another’s in level unembarrassed frankness.

They halted at the edge of the porch.  The girl sat down.  The young man nodded to Carr.  Though they had but lately been fair in the path of the thunderstorm they had escaped a wetting.  The girl’s eyes followed her father’s glance, seemed to read his thought.

“We happened to find a spruce thick enough to shed the rain,” she smiled.  “Or I suppose we’d have been soaked properly.”

The young fellow tarried only till she was seated.  He had no more than greeted Carr before he lifted his old felt hat to her.