“Hush! a voice from the far-away,
   ‘Listen and learn,’ it seems to say;
   ‘All the to-morrows shall be as to-day,’”

sang Amy with pathetic sweetness.  Zara suddenly moved, as if oppressed, from her position among us as we stood clustered together, and stepped out through the French window into the outside balcony, her head uncovered to the night.

“You will catch cold!” Mrs. Challoner and I both called to her simultaneously.  She shook her head, smiling back at us; and folding her arms lightly on the stone balustrade, leaned there and looked up at the clouds.

  “The link must break, and the lamp must die;
   Good-bye to Hope!  Good-bye—­good-bye!”

Amy’s voice was a peculiarly thrilling one, and on this occasion sounded with more than its usual tenderness.  What with her singing and the invisible presence of the storm, an utter silence possessed us—­not one of us cared to move.

Heliobas once stepped to his sister’s side in the open balcony, and said something, as I thought, to warn her against taking cold; but it was a very brief whisper, and he almost immediately returned to his place amongst us.  Zara looked very lovely out there; the light coming from the interior of the room glistened softly on the sheen of her satin dress and its ornaments of pearls; and the electric stone on her bosom shone faintly, like a star on a rainy evening.  Her beautiful face, turned upwards to the angry sky, was half in light and half in shade; a smile parted her lips, and her eyes were bright with a look of interest and expectancy.  Another sudden glare, and the clouds were again broken asunder; but this time in a jagged and hasty manner, as though a naked sword had been thrust through them and immediately withdrawn.

“That was a nasty flash,” said Colonel Everard, with an observant glance at the lovely Juliet-like figure on the balcony.  “Mademoiselle, had you not better come in?”

“When it begins to rain I will come in,” she said, without changing her posture.  “I hear the singing so well out here.  Besides, I love the storm.”

A tumultuous crash of thunder, tremendous for its uproar and the length of time it was prolonged, made us look at each other again with anxious faces.

  “What are we waiting for?  Oh, my heart! 
   Kiss me straight on the brows and part! 
   Again! again, my heart, my heart! 
   What are we waiting for, you and I? 
   A pleading look—­a stifled cry! 
   Good-bye for ever—–­”

Horror! what was that?  A lithe swift serpent of fire twisting venomously through the dark heavens!  Zara raised her arms, looked up, smiled, and fell—­senseless!  With such appalling suddenness that we had scarcely recovered from the blinding terror of that forked lightning-flash, when we saw her lying prone before us on the balcony where one instant before she had stood erect and smiling!  With exclamations of alarm and distress we lifted and bore her within the room and laid her tenderly down upon the nearest sofa.  At that moment a deafening, terrific thunder-clap—­one only—­as if a huge bombshell had burst in the air, shook the ground under our feet; and then with a swish and swirl of long pent-up and suddenly-released wrath, down came the rain.