“Monsieur might be kept at Couttet’s one, two—­three days.  But, if monsieur wishes, I will go on and tell the friends of mademoiselle that you are detained.”

“Oh, no!” cried Ruth, filled with horror at the suggestion.  “We must return.  I shall not mind the rain, if it comes.”

As she spoke, a loose handful of large drops rustled through the pine-boughs overhead, and softly dashed themselves against the rocks.

“It has come,” said Lynde.

“I have my waterproof,” returned the girl.  “I shall do very well.  But you”—­

The sentence was cut short by a flash of lightning, followed by a heavy peal of thunder that rolled through the valley and reverberated for one or two minutes among the hills.  The guide grasped the reins close up to the bits, and urged the mule forward at a brisk trot.  The sky cleared, and for a moment it looked as if the storm had drifted elsewhere; but the party had not advanced twenty paces before there was a strange rustling sound in the air, and the rain came down.  The guide whipped off a coarse woollen coat he wore, and threw it over the girl’s shoulders, tying it by the sleeves under her chin.

“Oh, you must not do that!” she cried, “you will catch your death!”

“Mademoiselle,” he replied, laughing, as he gave another knot to the sleeves, “for thirty-eight years, man and boy, I have been rained upon and snowed upon—­and voila!”

“You’re a fine fellow, my friend, if you do speak English,” cried Lynde, “and I hope some honest girl has found it out before now.”

“Monsieur,” returned the man, signing himself with the cross, “she and the little one are in heaven.”

The rain came down in torrents; it pattered like shot against the rocks; it beat the air of the valley into mist.  Except the path immediately before them, and the rocky perpendicular wall now on their right and now on their left, the travellers could distinguish nothing through the blinding rain.  Shortly the wind began to blow, whistling in the stiff pines as it whistles among the taut cordage of a ship in a gale.  At intervals it tore along the salient zigzags and threatened to sweep the mules off their legs.  The flashes of lightning now followed one another in rapid succession, and the thunder crashed incessantly through the gorges.  It appeared as if the great cones and cromlechs were tumbling pell-mell from every direction into the valley.

Though the situation of the three persons on the mountain side was disagreeable to the last extent, they were exposed to only one especial danger—­that from a land-slide or a detached boulder.  At every ten steps the guide glanced up the dripping steep, and listened.  Even the mules were not without a prescience of this peril.  The sharpest lightning did not make them wince, but at the faintest sound of a splinter of rock or a pebble rustling down the slope, their ears instantly went forward at an acute angle.  The footing soon became difficult on account of the gullies formed by the rain.  In spite of his anxiety concerning Ruth, Lynde could not help admiring the skill with which the sagacious animals felt their way.  Each fore hoof as it touched the earth seemed endowed with the sense of fingers.