For several hours, Catherine sat at her open window, looking out into the close, hazy night. The soft wind, that every now and then had rustled through the trees, or shaken dewdrops from the thick ivy clustered beneath the overhanging eaves, had died away. As the mist settled down, and a few stars peeped out just over head, a black curtain of clouds seemed to rise up from the horizon, hiding the nearest objects in impenetrable darkness. The only sounds now heard were those that told of man's vicinity, and his restlessness: the occasional rumble of a distant vehicle; the chime of bells; sometimes the echo of a human voice, in the direction of the town; the ticking of a watch, or the hard breathing of those that slept; and these fell on the ear with strange distinctness, amid the awful stillness of nature. Presently, the clouds, that hung over a valley far away, opened horizontally for an instant, while a faint flash of lightning flickered behind, showing their cumbrous outline. In a few minutes a brighter flash in another quarter was followed by the low roll of distant thunder; and so the storm worked round, nearer and nearer, until it burst in all its fury over the hill on which the cottage stood. Miss Reed, who from her childhood had always felt an agonizing and unconquerable fear during a thunder-storm, roused from her light slumber, lay huddled up, and trembling, with her face buried in the pillow. She did not hear the door open or the footstep that approached so stealthily, before a hand was laid upon her shoulder; and starting up she recognized her cousin. "Oh, Catherine!" she faltered, covering her eyes, "do stay with me awhile; I am so terrified--and think of Edwin, too, exposed as he must be to it." "I _have_ been thinking of him, Annie." "But you are frightened, also, a little, are you not--with all your courage, or what made you shake so then?" said the poor girl, trying to draw her cousin nearer as flash after flash glared before her eyelids, and louder claps of thunder followed each other at shorter intervals. "I frightened?" replied the dauntless woman, "I frightened; and what at? Not at the thunder, surely; and as for lightning, if it strikes, they say, it brings a sudden and painless death, leaving but seldom even a mark upon the corpse. Who would not prefer this, to lingering on a bed of sickness." "Do not say so, Catherine, pray do not; only think if--O God, have mercy on us! Was not _that_ awful?" "Was it not grand? Magnificent--awful if you will. Think of its raging and reveling uncontrolled, and striking where and what it will, without a bound or limit to its fury. And fancy such a storm pent up in the narrow compass of a human breast, and yet not bursting its frail prison. What can the torments that they tell us of, hereafter, be to this?"