"I haven’t seen any trace of it ... this side of the Garra ... But of course we’re in the right direction ... We must get into the Corrie Bhreag sooner or later." Then came the rain—at first in flying showers, but very soon in thin gauze veils that swept along between them and the distant hills. Waterproofs were donned now; but they proved to be of little use—they were blown every kind of way, with an immensity of ballooning and flapping and clapping; while they materially impeded progress. But nevertheless the two wanderers struggled on bravely, hurling themselves, as it were, against these rude shocks and gusts, until their wet hair was flying all about their faces, and their eyes were smarting with the rain. Sometimes they paused to take breath—and to laugh, in a rueful way. "There’s nothing so horrid as wet wrists!" Mary called to her companion, on one of these occasions, as she shook her arms and hands. "It won’t be wrists only, very soon," said Käthchen, in reply, as they started on again. The gale increased in violence, so that on the higher slopes ahead of them the heather was beaten and driven into long waves of motion; while even through those whirling veils of rain they could see the torn shreds and tatters of lurid cloud that crossed the greyer sky. The moaning of the wind rose and fell in remote and plaintive cadence; and then again it would mount up into a shrill and long-continued scream, that struck terror to the heart. For there was no more laughter now. All their dogged, half-blind struggle against the storm did not seem to lead them any nearer to any practicable way of getting down to the coast; and they were afraid to leave the line they had conceived to be the march—the imaginary line which they had hoped would bring them to the Corrie Bhreag, or, at furthest and worst, to some portion of Glen Orme. And if the dusk were to come down and find them in these trackless solitudes? During one of their pauses to recover breath, and to get their wet hair out of their eyes and lips, Mary took off her waterproof, and her companion followed her example; the worse than useless garments were secured by a lump of rock, and left to be searched for by a shepherd on the following day. Then forward again—with the wind moaning and howling across these desert wastes—with the driving rain at once blinding and stifling them—and a dim unspoken fear of the coming darkness gradually taking possession of their mind. One odd thing was that though Mary Stanley was the taller and much the more strongly built of the two, she could not hold on as well as her smaller companion, who was in a measure familiar with the work of getting over heather-tufts and across peat-hags. Mary complained that the wind and the rain choked her—she could not breathe. And at last she stopped, panting, breathless, entirely exhausted with the terrible strain.