“Dead, missus.  We buried her last Tuesday.  I’m sorry, but—­”

Why finish?  She was lying out before him, straight and stark in the road.  A bolt of lightning which at that moment tore its way through the heavens brought into startling view her face, white with distraction, framed in a mass of iron-gray locks released by her fall.

“Good heaven!” burst from the lips of the frightened man as he stooped to lift her.  “What am I going to do now?”

The thunder answered him, or rather it robbed him for the moment of all thought.  Peal after peal rattled over the neighboring peaks, rocking the air on the uplands and filling his soul with dismay.  But when quiet had come again, hope returned with it.  She was not only standing upright but was crying in his ear: 

“Can I get into the house?  If I could stay there to-night, I could go back to-morrow.”

“I’ll see that you get in, if I have to break in a window,” he answered.  “But you’re sure that you will not be afraid to stay out this terrible storm in a house with no neighbors within half a mile?”

“I know the house.  I have been here before, and if Elvira Brown could face the storms of forty years from her solitary home, I can surely face a single one, without losing my courage.”

He said no more, but approaching the house, began to test such windows as he could reach.  He finally broke in a pane and released the latch; after that, entrance was easy.

Yet after he had opened the way for her and she had stepped into the dim interior, he felt loth to leave her.  Duty called him away.  The passenger awaiting him up the road was a man he could not afford to disappoint; yet he stood there longer than the occasion warranted, with the knob of the door in hand, watching her struggle with the lamp, which she at last succeeded in lighting.  As the walls of the hall and her anxiously bending figure burst into view, he uttered a quick “Good-by!”

She turned, smiled and tried to thank him, but the words failed to leave her lips.  A nearer and fiercer bolt had shot to earth at that instant, striking a tree so near that the noise of its fall mingled with the crash of the heavens.  When it had ceased, he had gone.  He could not face the look with which she met this new catastrophe.

That look never again left her.  When she saw herself in a glass, as she presently did, on entering one of the rooms lamp in hand, she was startled and muttered: 

“My own mother would pass me by if she saw me now.  I could go anywhere I wished without fear or dread.  Why did I leave New York?” And setting the lamp down, she covered her face and wept.

The storm abated; a few minutes of fiercely pouring rain, and all was over.  She was left in ghastly quiet—­a quiet which was almost worse than the turmoil which had preceded it—­to face her memories and accustom herself to the thought that the solitary woman with whose life everything she looked upon was so intimately connected was gone, never to pass through these doors again or touch with deft and careful fingers the infinite number of little belongings with which the house was filled.