She was soon at the porch-door beside him, and Gaunt, watching her face, could see the lines of strain grow softer, as if the moist air had filled their hollows in with kindly fingers. They stood there, the two of them, as if they could never have too much of the grey, cool air; and the heat of the past weeks, as they looked back upon it from this sanctuary, seemed like that of the burning, fiery furnace which both remembered from teachings of a far-off childhood. There was nothing fanciful about this change of theirs from fear to strength. Bred in a country which knows more of cloudy skies than blue, they needed rain after long abstention from it; and the mist was a sure herald of grace to come. “’Tis queer how the weather has ye at a word, Reuben,” said the widow presently. “I’m keen-set already for my breakfast, an’ that’s more nor I could say honestly for a week o’ days.” She would not have the door closed while they fried the rashers and the eggs, though the mist stole in and lay like smoke about the room. “Now, don’t ye go shutting the door against a friend,” she said, when Reuben made a movement to close it. “I’m only too thankful, lad, to have the right smell o’ food i’ my nostrils once again.” Later that day--a little past noon--the mist found its proper shape and fell in drops as quiet and as persistent as the breeze that pushed it forward. By sundown it was raining steadily, and, for the first time since their watch began, these two slept with no dreams to trouble them. When Gaunt woke late the next morning, the rain was lapping at the windows still, with a gentle, greedy patience that promised more to come. The clouds were lifting when he went out into the croft, and there was a blur of sunshine through the rain. The thirsty ground sucked in the moisture, and asked for more, and still showed riven cracks as dry as the molten heaven of two days ago; and from the pastures a ground-mist rose, as thick and smoky as the reek from the smithy down at Garth when Fool Billy’s fire was being coaxed into a blaze. Out of the rain, and the under moisture that reached up above his horse’s hocks, the doctor came to Ghyll. “All well, Mr. Gaunt?” he asked, with a note of strict routine in his voice. “Better for this God-sent weather, doctor.” “Oh, that’s your view, is it? I’m wet to the skin, and am like to be wetter before I’ve done. This quiet sort of rain goes deeper than your quick-come, quick-go storms. Still, it will clear the air, maybe, and you’ll remember that I prophesied it? Mr. Gaunt,” he broke off, with one of his sudden glances, as if he were probing a patient with the knife, “d’ye feel any lassitude; well, to put it plainly, d’ye feel the world is slipping from under you, like a crazy, limestone wall when you try to climb it?”