She shut her eyes for a moment as a violent flicker of lightning cut its way down from the clouds in the south, and waited, still with shut eyes, for the thunder. "It is still a long way off," said Evelyn, as the remote growl answered. "I know, but if you had seen the sky an hour ago. It was one turquoise. And I daren't go back to Brockenhurst. I must stop here and wait for them." "May I take you back?" asked Evelyn. "No; what good would that do? I may as well be terrified here as on the road. Also I can keep dry here." Again she winced as the lightning furrowed its zig-zag path through the clouds. This time the remoteness of the thunder was less reassuring; there was an angry, choking clap, which suggested that it meant business. By this time Evelyn had recovered himself from the first stabbing surprise of finding Madge alone here. Her terror, too, of the approaching storm had drowned his dislike of it; also, for the moment, at any rate, his ordinary, natural instinct of alleviating the mere physical fear of this girl drowned the more intimate sense of what she was to him. If only she might become thoroughly frightened and cling to him--for this outrageous possibility did cross his mind--how he would rejoice in the necessity that such an accident would force on him the necessity, since he knew that he would be unable to offer resistance, of saying that which he had told Merivale only a few days before he felt he could not help saying! But to do him justice, he dismissed such a possibility altogether; that it had passed through his mind he could not help, but all his conscious self rejected it. Then, at the moment of the angry answering thunder, a few big splashes of rain began to star the dry gravel-path below them, hot, splashing drops, like bullets. They fell with separate, distinct reports on the leaves of the lilacs and on the path; they hissed on the grass, they whispered in the yielding foliage of the roses of the pergola, and were like spirit-rappings on the roof of the verandah. And Madge's voice rose in suppressed terror: "Oh, where are they?" she cried. "Why don't they come back? He can't make the lightning just sit on his finger like the thrush. Shall we go to meet them? Oh, go to meet them, Mr. Dundas!" "And leave you alone?" he asked. Madge's wits had thoroughly deserted her. "No, don't do that," she cried. "Let's go indoors, and pull down the blinds and do something. What was that game you suggested once, that you should go out of the room while I thought of something, and that then you should come back and try to guess it. Anything, draughts, chess, surely there is something." Evelyn felt strangely master of himself. At least, he knew so well what was master of him that it came to the same thing. He had certainty anyhow on his side.