That was a fearsome night indeed, and one long to be remembered, the night before Mrs. Ranney was expected home. A wild September gale sent the deluge of rain aslant through the darkness, swirling it over lawns and among the trees into a river-torrent that carried all before it. It was a shrieking gale that tore up the houses with maniac fingers, wresting off shutters and chimney tops, dragging down trees in its giant fury, howling and whining between the shrieks like a forest of spectral wolves rushing ever faster and faster upon their prey. The rain beat in through window-casing and foundation, front doors flew open wide at the hand of the tempest. The steeple of the church came crashing down; the orphan asylum was unroofed; the affrighted fancy soared into realms of terror with the far-clanging sound of the fire-bell, caught and lost again amid the clamour of the storm. No one slept on the Ridge that night; mothers sat by the bedside of their little children, fathers patrolled the house to see that timbers held, and the fire was kept low. There was not a household near the Ranneys’ in which some member had not said awesomely to another: “And she is out on the ocean!” Imagination pictured the husband (as indeed Minda described him afterwards), walking up and down, up and down, up and down, with savage, miserable eyes, all night long, desperately fighting with agonized thoughts. But, with the first sullen rays of the morning light he was gone. The tempest had abated into a fog-filled, engulfing rain, that washed all the landscape into a dirty yellow. The street on the Ridge was flooded from end to end, so that a canoe might paddle down it; but the women who lived on the same side of the way ventured with rain-coats and overshoes into each others’ houses to compare notes of the night, and to commune tearfully on the news of the morning papers. It was rumoured that the _Patriot_ had foundered with all on board. “That girl with her two babies”—suppose she could never know. All that day men and women stood in line by the offices of the Nor-Coast Steamship Company, waiting, waiting, waiting for the word that meant life, or the losing of it. The “extras” with scare-lines about the _Patriot_ with letters a foot long, were thrust before the eyes, or called in the ears of that waiting throng that thinned and fluctuated and filled up again. The extras even reached the Ridge. But at five o’clock Mr. Laurence brought home word that the _Patriot’s_ passengers had been transferred from the sinking steamer to the ship of another line, and were expected in by seven.