The wind-whips lashed the many-windowed Mausoleum, and the roar and swirl of dashing water echoed from roof and veranda-cover. The autumn gale-blasts set the naked trees to creaking and groaning like sentient things. Here and there a huge branch was ripped from its trunk and ploughed a gash in the lawn’s withered turf. More than one maple and ash on the Conover grounds crashed to earth with a rending din that was drowned in the howl of the storm. A belated equinoctial was sweeping the Mountain State, driven on the breath of a tornado such as not one year in twenty can record, east of the Mississippi. Its screaming onset unroofed houses, tore up forest giants, wrecked telegraph lines, buffeted fragile dwellings to their fall and dissolved hayricks into miles of flying wisps. Yet none of the three members of the Conover family, sheltered within the Mausoleum, were awakened by the bellow of the cyclone, for none were asleep. Letty, alone in her great, hideous bedroom, lay alternately praying and weeping in maudlin comfortlessness over her absent daughter; and at sound of the hubbub outside wept the more and prayed with an added terror. Gerald, despite the early start he must make in the morning, was still dressed, and was slouching back and forth in his suite of apartments, muttering occasionally to himself, and at other times pausing to gaze lifelessly ahead of him. As the ever-louder voice of the storm broke in on his thoughts, he stopped short in his aimless march, his dry lips twitching and on his face the nervous terror of a suddenly awakened child. He shambled into an inner chamber, unlocked and opened a drawer in his chiffonier, fumbled for a moment or two with something he took therefrom, then closed and locked the drawer and returned to the light. In a few moments the nervousness had died out of his face and bearing, and with a return of his habitual listless air he had resumed his walk. Caleb Conover, stretched on a camp-bed in the corner of his study, smiled contentedly as the rain beat in torrents on the panes. But when the gale waxed fiercer and the rain at last ceased, he frowned. “Going to blow off clear and cold after all!” he grumbled, turning over. “And the Weather Bureau’s the only one that can’t be ‘fixed.’” But even the shriek of the storm could not long hold his attention. The Railroader was vaguely troubled as to himself. Heretofore, like Napoleon’s, his steel will had been able to dictate to Nature as imperiously as to his fellow-man. When he had commanded the presence of Sleep, the drowsy god had hastened on the moment to do his bidding. He had slumbered or awakened at wish. On the eve of his greatest crisis he had been unable to sleep like a baby. Yet for the past few weeks he had been aware of a subtle change. Sleep had deserted him, even as had so much else that he had loftily regarded as his to command.