At night-fall, the sky was covered with clouds. A severe storm seemed imminent. The riders quickened their pace, but they were still more than a league from Saint-Sauveur when the storm burst. It grew very dark; the horses were frightened, and the Comte de Morangy's ran away with him. The little cavalcade became scattered, and the utmost efforts of the guides, who accompanied them on foot, were required to prevent some serious accident from bringing to a melancholy close a day that had begun so merrily. Lionel, lost in the appalling darkness, compelled to walk along the edge of the cliff, leading his horse, for fear of falling over the precipice with him, was tormented by the keenest disquietude. He had lost sight of Lavinia, despite all his efforts, and had been seeking her anxiously for fifteen minutes, when a flash of lightning revealed the figure of a woman seated on a rock just above the road. He stopped, listened, and recognized Lady Blake's voice; but a man was with her; it could be no one but Monsieur de Morangy. Lionel cursed him in his heart; and, bent upon disturbing his rival's happiness, if he could do no more, he walked toward the couple as best he could. What was his joy on recognizing Henry with his cousin! He, like the kind-hearted, devil-may-care comrade he was, gave up his place to him, and walked away to hold the horses. Nothing is so solemn and magnificent as the tumult of a storm in the mountains. The loud voice of the thunder, rumbling over the chasms, is repeated and echoes loudly in their depths; the wind, lashing the tall fir-trees and forcing them against the perpendicular cliff as a garment clings to the human form, also plunges into the gorges and utters shrill, long-drawn laments like sobs. Lavinia, absorbed in contemplation of the imposing spectacle, listened to the numberless noises of the storm-riven mountain, waiting until another flash should cast its bluish glare over the landscape. She started when it showed her Sir Lionel seated by her side, in the place occupied by her cousin a moment before. Lionel thought that she was frightened by the storm, and he took her hand to reassure her. Another flash showed her to him, with one elbow resting on her knee, and her chin on her hand, gazing enthusiastically at the wonderful scene produced by the raging elements. "Great heaven!" she exclaimed; "how beautiful it is! how dazzling and soft at once that blue glare! Did you see the jagged edges of the rock that gleamed like sapphires, and that livid background against which the ice-clad peaks towered aloft like giant spectres in their shrouds? Did you notice, too, that, in the sudden passage from darkness to light and from light to darkness, everything seemed to move and waver, as if the mountains were tottering to their fall?"