Mistress Gridley shrank away, trembling in every limb. The sight confirmed all her apprehensions. She hurried back to the house. But in the excitement of the pursuit she had not noticed the change in the sky, which had grown in the last few moments dark and overcast. The first peal of the tempest, therefore, surprised her as she retreated. Startled and affrighted, she looked up and saw the black canopy impending over her head; with a cry, she crouched still lower, as if she might in that way escape the wrath she had invoked. Her nerves were so shaken that she never doubted the child had brought this sudden storm upon her, and even when it did her no harm, when it resolved itself into the most ordinary phenomenon and descended in sheets of rain, while the mountains clothed themselves in mist, and the moor streamed at a hundred pores--even then, though she had seen such a storm a hundred times and knew its every aspect, she still quailed. A terror of great darkness was upon her. She dared no longer meet the child's eyes, but sat in the farthest corner of the room, furtively watching him; while the eaves dripped outside, and the cold light of a wet summer evening stole across the moor. When he was gone to bed and his eye withdrawn from her, she felt more at ease. But her discomposure was still so great that Simon and Luke must have remarked it when they returned, if they had not been themselves full of an anxiety which occupied their minds to the exclusion of everything else. "This rain!" Simon cried, as he shook out his dripping cloak on the floor and turned to take a last look through the open door. "Who would have foreseen it? Who would have foreseen it, I say, this morning? Never did sky look better. Yet if it goes on through the night they will scarcely get the guns over the hills by this road. The General will be late." "It grows more heavy," Luke answered moodily, looking out over the other's shoulder. "Ay, and the clouds are low," Simon assented. "I never knew rain more sudden in my life, nor, surely, more untimely. There is many a man will be damp tonight and march the slower to-morrow. Heaven grant it hinders the malignants also!" "The wind is westerly," Luke answered shrewdly. "I doubt it." Simon shrugged his shoulders as sharing the doubt, and would have closed the door. But at that moment his wife, who had already risen from her seat, laid her hand on his arm. The hand trembled. The woman's eyes were glittering, her cheeks white. "Simon!" she said, peering into his face, and speaking in a tone of suppressed excitement, "what is it--this storm? Whom does it hinder? What does it matter? What was it you were saying about it?"