Flora sped out of the yard.  Her blue dress, lashing around her feet, changed color in the ghastly light of the storm.  Some flying leaves struck her in the face.  At the gate a cloud of dust from the road nearly blinded her.  She realized in a bewildered fashion that there were three women on the other side struggling frantically with the latch.

“Does Mis’ Jane Field live here?” inquired one of them, breathlessly.

“No,” replied Flora; “that isn’t her name.”

“She don’t?”

“No,” gasped Flora, her head lowered before the wind.

“Well, I want to know, ain’t this the old Maxwell place?”

“Yes,” said Flora.

Some great drops of rain began to fall; there was another flash.  The woman struggled mightily, and prevailed over the gate-latch.  She pushed it open.  “Well, I don’t care,” said she, “I’m comin’ in, whether or no.  I dunno but my bonnet-strings will spot, an’ I ain’t goin’ to have my best clothes soaked.  It’s mighty funny nobody knows where Mis’ Field lives; but this is the old Maxwell house, where she wrote Mandy she lived, an’ I’m goin’ in.”

Flora stood aside, and the three women entered with a rush.  Lois, standing near the door front, saw them coming through the greenish-yellow gloom, their three black figures scudding before the wind like black-sailed ships.

“Land sakes!” shrieked out Mrs. Babcock, “there’s Lois now!  Lois, how are you?  I’d like to know what that girl we met at the gate meant telling us they didn’t live here.  Why, Lois Field, how do you do?  Where’s your mother?  I guess we’d better step right in, an’ not stop to talk.  It’s an awful tempest.  I’m dreadful afraid my bonnet trimmin’ will spot.”

They all scurried up the steps and into the house.  Then the women turned and kissed Lois, and raised a little clamor of delight over her.  She stood panting.  She did not ask them into the sitting-room.  Her head whirled.  It seemed to her that the end of everything had come.

But Mrs. Babcock turned toward the sitting-room door.  She had pulled off her bonnet, and was wiping it anxiously with her handkerchief.  “This is the way, ain’t it?” she said.

Lois followed them in helplessly.  The room was dark as night, for the shutters were closed.  Mrs. Babcock flung one open peremptorily.

“We’ll break our necks here, if we don’t have some light,” she said.  The hail began to rattle on the window-panes.

“It’s hailin’!” the women chorussed.

“Are your windows all shut?” Mrs. Babcock demanded of Lois.

And the girl said, in a dazed way, that the bedroom windows were open, and then went mechanically to shut them.

“Shut the blinds, too!” screamed Mrs. Babcock.  “The hail’s comin’ in this side terrible heavy.  I’m afraid it’ll break the glass.”  Mrs. Babcock herself, her face screwed tightly against an onslaught of wind and hail, shut the blinds, and the room was again plunged in darkness.  “We’ll have to stan’ it,” said she.  “Mis’ Field don’t want her windows all broke in.  That’s dreadful sharp.”