Honor sat down before the work-table, which was strewed all over with the marks of woman’s industry and handicraft--men’s lambswool stockings in readiness for mending, a corner of hideous patchwork protruding from an open basket, and a general aspect around of rather unpicturesque disorder. It was part of Honor’s daily employment to “tidy the tables” after one of Mrs. Beacham’s mending mornings was brought to a close, and, but for the rattling thunder overhead, she would have proceeded to her task at once. The noise of the storm, however, together with the solitude of the room, overcame and oppressed her--the vivid flashes of lightning, darting across her face, dazzled her eyes; so resting her face upon her outspread arms, she endeavoured, as best she could, to shut out the startling tokens of the tempest. But all in vain. Honor, though not (as it is called in common parlance) _afraid_ of thunder and lightning, had it in her to be morbidly sensitive to an atmosphere heavily laden, as was the case at present, with electric fluid. Her head, which had begun to ache violently, seemed as if bound with a circlet of iron, and she felt miserably depressed and nervous--so nervous, that for almost the first time in her life she experienced a dread of being alone. It was intensely foolish and cowardly and absurd--of _that_ Honor would have been the first, in her sober senses, to acknowledge the truth; but she was hardly herself just then, the thunder boomed with such startling violence over the old house, and the wind, which had commenced with a warning murmur, was howling amidst the trees, as it seemed, in very rage and fury. Truly it was an awful storm. Each thunderclap sounded louder and more vengeful than the last, till gathering, as it would appear, its forces for a final outburst, such a volley rattled over Honor’s bent-down head, that in a perfect agony of terror she sprang upon her feet, and was rushing from the room when her steps were arrested by the sight of a human figure advancing rapidly from the open doorway. A real cordial, even in that moment of bewilderment and fear, the cheerful voice of Arthur Vavasour seemed to Honor when he said lightly-- “What, all alone in the storm? No joke, is it? By Jove, I don’t know that I was ever out in a worse.” She tried to recover herself; it was mortifying, hateful, to be thought such a silly coward; but her nerves were overwrought (meteorological influences have a peculiar effect sometimes on certain delicately-organised constitutions); and when another thunderclap, still fiercer than the preceding one, crashed over the old-tiled roof, and the room was all ablaze with dazzling light, Honor, pale and trembling, and utterly bereft, for the moment, of self-command, uttered a faint cry of terror, and hid her white face against the nearest screen--that screen chancing, unluckily, to be Arthur Vavasour’s shoulder!