All night long the storm bellowed and flickered about the town, but about four in the morning the guns of heaven were silent, and the rain began to fall less heavily, and when Jeannie woke, soon after six, the room was filled with the transparent aqueous light of a clear dawn. A smell of unutterable cleanliness came in through the open window, and from her bed she saw the last star fade in the dove-coloured sky. Short as had been her sleep, she felt no inclination to lie in bed, and got up and went to the bath-room. A rain-gauge was on the leads outside, and stepping out through the open window she examined it and saw that two inches of rain had fallen in the night. The flowers in the garden-beds, as she had expected, were beaten down and robbed of their petals, and the smaller gravel from the paths had been swept on to the grass in a spreading delta. The stalwart-leaved mulberry had not suffered, and the outline of leaves was cut out with lavishness and clearness against the tenderness of the sky. Above no traces of the overpast tempest lingered: the pale blue of the zenith melted with imperceptible gradation into the dove colour of the horizons on the west and north, in the south-west the pink of the dawn was already growing gilded before the sun imminent to rise. Already, so it seemed to Jeannie, a flush of green had spread over the grass, and the glistening house-roofs, so long dust-ridden, looked clean again. Above all, the intolerable oppression of the air was no more than a sick dream of night, and to be abroad in this exquisite dawn was like coming out of an ill-ventilated tunnel into the coolness of Alpine pastures. Even as she looked a beam of the risen day shot its level arrow and struck the elm-trees in the close, and with the aptest punctuality a thrush scudded out of the bushes below her and poured out a throatful of repeated song. And on the moment a verse from the song of songs chimed in her head. “The rain is over and past, the flowers appear on the earth, the time of the singing birds has come.” She stood looking out over the fair rejuvenated earth, smiling. At last she turned. “Indeed it has come,” she said. CHAPTER XVII