“You’ve got to,” replied Onslow, wearily, “unless you choose to go down the beach and sit in the water with your clothes on.” “That would be some relief, although the water is as hot as tea. But I shan’t do that. I shall walk out along the pier over the sea. One may faint half way, and tumble over and get drowned; but anyway that’s better than staying here and being cooked slowly.” They got up together, and strolled wearily over the loose white sand, and then more crisply over the worn decking of the pier. Between the lightning flashes, the darkness above them was the darkness of a cave; but faint, phosphorescent fringes showed out amongst the piles beneath, and these guided them from walking over the edge of the planks. “You shouldn’t stay down here this weather,” Onslow said, as they paced down the narrow platform, with fingers intertwined. “You’ll lose your color and your beauty if you do, and get thin and sallow like Mrs. Van Liew.” No reply came, and Onslow said nothing more, but walked on thinking. “You’ve been here now nine whole days, Pat,” the girl said, breaking silence for the second time, when they were half a mile from the shore. “It can’t be. Yes, you’re right. Nine days! Time has gone quickly. What have we been doing all the time? Fishing once or twice, and a picnic to that Mound-Builder’s place down the canal; and I believe that’s all. We’ve just talked, and sometimes not even talked. You and I, little girl, know one another well enough to be companionable without always chatting. You see, we’ve always known one another. But still, nine solid days! I’d no idea till you spoke how long it was in actual point of time. It’s been very restful.” “You seem to have found it so. You’ve stayed all the time close about here. Do you know you have not once gone so much as a dozen miles from Point Sebastian.” Mrs. Duvernay’s place was fifteen miles away. Onslow saw the point. “No,” he said. “I haven’t found time. You and I have had so much to tell one another, Elsie.” “We always have been very good friends,” said the girl, and was going to add something else when her words were drowned by a furious crash of thunder. There had been no working up to it. The summer lightning was noiseless, and there had not been so much as a mutter of thunder all the day. The great bellow of noise had come in an instant without a rustle of warning. “That’s close overhead,” Onslow remarked, “and something else will follow. If it’s rain, we shall have a deluge falling in ropes, but I fancy we’re in for something different. We had better turn back, Elsie.” “In view of this heat, a wetting would be a distinct luxury; but I think, as you say, there is something else coming besides. Oh, Pat, here it is. Run, or we shall be caught.” The storm gave but one weird moan, a rustle and a shriek from over the treetops, and then was upon them. In a minute it was blowing with a hurricane force which no human being could stand against.