Dorothy washed the milk-things now, and the mother spent her days in the sunny east room, between her bed and the easy-chair, where she sat and mused for hours over the five letters that she had received from her husband in as many months. The boys had, in a measure, justified their father's faith in them, since Rachel's illness, and Dorothy was released from much of her out-door work; but the silence of the kitchen, when she was there alone with her ironing and dish washing, was a heavier burden than she had yet known. Nature sometimes strikes in upon the hopeless monotony of life in remote farmhouses with one of her phenomenal moods. They come like besoms of destruction, but they scatter the web of stifling routine; they fling into the stiffening pool the stone which jars the atoms into crystal. The storms, that had ambushed in the lurid August skies and circled ominously round the horizon during the first weeks of September, broke at last in an equinoctial which was long remembered in the mill-house. It took its place in the family calendar of momentous dates with the hard winter of 1800, with the late frost that had coated the incipient apples with ice and frozen the new potatoes in the ground in the spring of '97, and with the year the typhus had visited the valley. The rain had been falling a night and a day; it had been welcomed with thanksgiving, but it had worn out its welcome some hours since, and now the early darkness was coming on without a lull in the storm. Dorothy and the two older boys had made the rounds of the farm-buildings, seeing all safe for the second night. The barns and mill stood on high ground, while the house occupied the sheltered hollow between. Little streams from the hills were washing in turbid currents across the lower levels; the waste-weir roared as in early spring, the garden was inundated, and the meadow a shallow pond. The sheep had been driven into the upper barn floor: the chickens were in the corn-bin; and old John and the cows had been transferred from the stable, that stood low, to the weighing floor of the mill. A gloomy echoing and gurgling sounded from the dark wheel-chamber where the water was rushing under the wheel and jarring it with its tumult. At eight o'clock the woodshed was flooded and water began to creep under the kitchen door. Dorothy and the boys carried armfuls of wood and stacked them in the passage to the sitting-room, two steps higher up. At nine o'clock the boys were sent protesting to bed, and Dorothy, looking out of their window as she fumbled about in the dark for a pair of Shep's trousers that needed mending, saw a lantern flickering up the road. It was Evesham on his way to the mill-dams. The light glimmered on his oilskin coat as he climbed the stile behind the well-curb.