He remained leaning against the counter near the door; the old clerk lounged against the next one, on the end of which Sam Riggs was perched.  Charlotte remained standing in the doorway, leaning slightly against the post, and they all watched the storm, which was fast reaching its height.  The flashes of lightning were more frequent, the crashes of thunder followed fast, sound overlapping sight.  The rain became a flood.  The girl watched, with the intense, self-forgetful delight of a child, the plash of the great blobs of rain on the macadamized road outside.  They came to look to her exactly like little figures chasing one another in an unintermittent race of annihilation.  She smiled, watching them.  Anderson, looking from the rain to her, saw the smile, and thought with a little pang that she was probably thinking of her own happiness when she smiled to herself like that.  He kept his eyes fixed upon her for a moment, her glistening dark head, her smooth cheek, her smiling mouth, her shoulders faintly pink through her thin white gown, which, being wet, clung to them.  Charlotte’s shoulders were thin, but the hollowing curve from the throat to the arm was ravishing.  Anderson’s face hardened a little.  He looked away again at the rain.

All at once Charlotte glanced up from the dancing flight of the rain-drops on the road, and laughed.  “Why,” she cried, “there is Ina!  There is my sister!”

Anderson looked, and in a second-story window opposite was a girl’s head in a violet-trimmed hat.  She was smiling and nodding.  Charlotte waved her hand to her.

“I’ll be over as soon as it holds up a little,” she cried out.  “Did you get wet?”

The girl in the window hollowed a slim hand over an ear.

“Did you get caught in the shower?  Did you get wet?” called Charlotte.

The girl in the window shook her head gayly.

“She didn’t,” Charlotte said, with an absurd but charming confidence to Anderson; “but, anyway, she didn’t have on her very best hat.”

“I am very glad,” Anderson replied, politely.  He read a sign fastened beneath the window which framed the girl’s head—­“Madame Estelle Griggs, Modiste.”  He reflected that she was the Banbridge dressmaker, and that Charlotte was probably having her trousseau made there, which was a deduction that only a masculine mind of vivid imagination could have evolved.

Charlotte was gazing eagerly across at her sister.  “It does not rain nearly so hard now,” said she.  “I think I might venture.”  She looked irresolutely at her hat on the counter.

“I can let you have an umbrella,” said Anderson.

“Thank you,” said Charlotte, “but my hair is still so wet, and my hat is lined with pink chiffon, you know.”

“Yes,” said Anderson, respectfully.  He did not know what pink chiffon was, but he understood that water would injure it.

“If I might leave my hat here,” said Charlotte, “until I come back—­”