Then she hurriedly divested herself of the white lawn wrapper which she had worn all day, and put on her black summer silk gown, with a wrap and a bonnet and an umbrella at hand.  Mrs. Anderson was not afraid of a thunder-shower in the ordinary sense, but her imagination never failed her.  Therefore she was always dressed, in case the worst should happen and she be forced to flee from a stricken house.  She also had her small and portable treasures ready at hand.  Then she sat down in the middle of the sitting-room well out of range of the chimney, and prayed for her own and her son’s safety, and incidentally for the safety of the maid, who was in the adjoining room with the door open, and for the house and her son’s store.  She always did thus in a thunder-shower, but she never told any one this innocent childish secret of an innocent old soul.

She thought with a sort of undercurrent of faithlessness of the great draught in her son’s store if the large front doors and the office door were both open, as there was a strong probability of their being.  She thought uneasily that her son might be that very moment in that draught, as indeed he was.  He stood in the strong current of fresh storm-air, with its pungent odors, more like revelations than odors, of things which had been in abeyance for some time past in the drought.  The smell of the wet green things was like a paean of joy.  It was a call of renewed life out of concealed places of fainting and hiding.  There were scents of flowers and fruits, and another strange odor, like the smell of battle, from all the ferment on the earth which had precipitated the storm.  It was quite a severe thunder-shower.  The rain had held off for a fierce prelude, then it came in solid cataracts.  Then it was that Charlotte Carroll rushed into the store.  She was dripping, beaten like a flower, by the force of the liquid flail of the storm.  She had pulled off the rose-wreathed hat which was dear to her heart, and she had it under her dress skirt, which she held up over her lace-trimmed petticoat modestly, with as little revelation as might be.  Her dark head glistened with the rain.

Anderson stepped forward quickly.  “Pray come into the office, Miss Carroll,” he said.

But she remained standing in front of the door, having removed her hat furtively from its shelter.  “No, thank you,” said she, “I would rather stay here.  I like to watch it.”

Anderson fetched a chair from his office, but she thanked him and said that she preferred standing.

“I thought I had time to get to Madame Griggs’s on the other side of the street,” said she, “but all at once it came down.”

Anderson felt her ungraciousness, but she herself did not seem to realize it at all.  Presently she gave a little sidewise smile at him, and comprehended in the smile the old clerk and the boy who hovered near.

“It is a fine shower,” said she, with a kind of confidential glee.  As she spoke she looked out at the snarl of rain shot with lances of electric fire, and there was a curious elation, almost like intoxication, in her expression.  She was in a fine spiritual excitement.