“It’s at hand. It crossed the street in front of his car just as the wind came tearing like a railroad train. He saw her face for an instant before it caught her. Well, folks--I can’t tell you how Eric spoke of her face. He forgot that he had ever seen a court room or a law office, or had known indifference or ambition. He said to me--I can see him as he rapped the table and forgot he was speaking--‘The face of that girl, Kent!’ And--can you believe it of Eric?--he went on: ‘Do you remember Raphael’s peasant girl? The one with parted lips and queer, asking eyes? She was exactly like her. The wind took her sunbonnet away. She had two long braids of hair. She stopped and stared at me, her long, brown-gray skirt twisting about her little flat shoes. Then she ran on, clutching her braids, and a near door slammed after her.’ “The wind was on then; the few trees bent before it. “The rain was close. There was no protection and, acting on impulse, he drove the car back of the huge sign. It was a shield from the wind and a slight protection against the slanting rain. “Eric said it had been years since he had seen a Western storm, where it lets loose and whoops ’er up. He was half blinded with the lightning; he could hear the smash of small buildings; the rattling scurry of débris blown by the wind. His own shelter shivered, creaked. It was braced strongly from the back, but he thought it more than likely that it would go. Across the street he heard one go down with a splitting thud. “But as he waited, he was conscious, he said, only of the girl who was somewhere in that strange town. I’d like to have had you--you people who think you know Eric--watch him as he told me this. There was not a drop of blood in his body, to judge from the colour of his face; his fingers twitched. He talked because he had to talk to some one, I guess. He was not self-sufficient just then.” “Hm-m,” said some one. “I don’t get him in that rôle, and still I do, too, in a way: the force in him could be applied as well to an--er--infatuation as to anything else. I suppose it _was_ an infatuation, eh, Kent? They are strange things, but they wear off.” “Go on,” said Janet. “He said that he sat there in the car while the wind bent his board protection and the rain came in sheets. He was wet through from the spray where it struck the outer edge of the car. He sat and watched pictures of that girl’s face: they came through the rain; came into the lightning; came everywhere. He was half conscious, he said, absorbed in the new thing.