After twice shrieking this horrible supplication, she dropped her arms with a gesture of sullen despair, and stalked slowly, reeking wet, into the house. In the hall, looking out upon this scene of demoniacal possession, sat Bessie Lauson and her maiden aunt, Miss Mercy Lauson, while behind them, coming from an inner room, appeared the burly figure of the old Squire. As Mrs. Lauson passed the two women, they drew a little aside with a sort of shrinking which arose partly from a desire to avoid her dripping garments, and partly from that awe with which most of us regard ungovernable passion. The Squire, on the contrary, met his wife with a sarcastic twinkle of his grim gray eyes, and a scoff which had the humor discoverable in the contrast between total indifference and furious emotion. “Closed your camp-meeting early, Mrs. Lauson,” said the old man; “can’t expect a streak of lightning for such a short service.” A tormentor who wears a smile inflicts a double agony. Mrs. Lauson wrung her hands, and broke out in a cry of rage and anguish: “O Lord, let it strike me! O Lord, let it strike me!” Squire Lauson took a chair, crossed his thick, muscular legs, glanced at his wife, glanced at the levin-seamed sky, and remarked with a chuckle, “I’m waiting to see this thing out.” “Father, I say it’s perfectly awful,” remonstrated Miss Mercy Lauson. “Mother, ain’t you ashamed of yourself?” Miss Mercy was an old maid of the grave, sad, sickly New England type. She pronounced her reproof in a high, thin, passionless monotone, without a gesture or a flash of expression, without glancing at the persons whom she addressed, looking straight before her at the wall. She seemed to speak without emotion, and merely from a stony sense of duty. It was as if a message had been delivered by the mouth of an automaton. Both the Squire and his wife made some response, but a prolonged crash of thunder drowned the feeble blasphemy of their voices, and the moving of their lips was like a mockery of life, as if the lips of corpses had been stirred by galvanism. Then, as if impatient of hearing both man and God, Mrs. Lauson clasped her hands over her ears, and fled away to some inner room of the shaking old house, seeking perhaps the little pity that there is for the wretched in solitude. The Squire remained seated, his gray and horny fingers drumming on the arms of the chair, and his faded lips murmuring some inaudible conversation. For the wretchedness of Mrs. Lauson there was partial cause in the disposition and ways of her husband. Very odd was the old Squire; violently combative could he be in case of provocation; and to those who resisted what he called his rightful authority he was a tyrant.