In all this he was, rather curiously, leaving the girl and her possible view of the matter entirely out of the question.  Horace, while he was not in the least self-deprecatory, and was disposed to be as just in his estimate of himself as of other men, was not egotistical.  It did not really occur to him that Rose’s fancy, too, might have been awakened as his own had been, that he might cause her suffering.  It went to prove his unselfishness that, upon entering the house, and seeing Rose seated beside a window with her embroidery, his first feeling was of satisfaction that she was housed and safe from the fast-gathering storm.

Rose looked up as he entered, and smiled.

“There’s a storm overhead,” remarked Horace.

“Yes,” said Rose.  “Aunt Sylvia has just told me I ought not to use a needle, with so much lightning.  She has been telling me about a woman who was sewing in a thunder-storm, and the needle was driven into her hand.”  Rose laughed, but as she spoke she quilted her needle into her work and tossed it on a table, got up, and went to the window.

“It looks almost wild enough for a cyclone,” she said, gazing up at the rapid scud of gray, shell-like clouds.

“Rose, come right away from that window,” cried Sylvia, entering from the dining-room.  “Only last summer a woman in Alford got struck standing at a window in a tempest.”

“I want to look at the clouds,” said Rose, but she obeyed.

Sylvia put a chair away from the fireplace and out of any draught.  “Here,” said she.  “Set down here.”  She drew up another chair close beside Rose and sat down.  There came a flash of lightning and a terrible crash of thunder.  A blind slammed somewhere.  Out in the great front yard the rain swirled in misty columns, like ghostly dancers, and the flowering shrubs lashed the ground.  Horace watched it until Sylvia called him, also, to what she considered a place of safety.  “If you don’t come away from that window and set on the sofa I shall have a conniption fit,” she said.  Horace obeyed.  As he sat down he thought of Henry, and without stopping to think, inquired where he was.

“He went down to Mr. Meeks’s,” replied Sylvia, with calm decision.

Horace stared at her.  He wondered if she could possibly be lying, or if she really believed what she said.

He did not know what had happened that afternoon; neither did Rose.  Rose had gone out for a walk, and while Sylvia was alone a caller, Mrs. Jim Jones, had come.  Mrs. Jim Jones was a very small, angry-looking woman.  Nature had apparently intended her to be plump and sweet and rosy, and altogether comfortable, but she had flown in the face of nature, like a cross hen, and had her own way with herself.

It was scarcely conceivable that Mrs. Jim Jones could be all the time in the state of wrath against everything in general which her sharp tongue and her angry voice evinced, but she gave that impression.  Her little blond face looked like that of a doll which has been covered with angry pin-scratches by an ill-tempered child.  Whenever she spoke these scratches deepened.