Catharine left her bed, feverish and excited by these thoughts. She felt sure that Madame De Marke had not recognized her; for she had been standing on one side in the library, when those evil eyes looked through the window. But the very sight of her old enemy left a nervous dread behind it, and she could not rest. Events of importance to her own destiny seemed to be crowding themselves around her, vaguely, it is true, but with a force that awoke a sort of terror in her. She opened her chamber-window and sat down. Elsie was moaning and muttering in her bed, agonized by sleeping terrors. The wind without rose high and blustering; clouds lowered down among the trees; and gusts of rain drifted through the leaves, bathing them, as it were, with liquid diamonds, through which the lightning shot from time to time, with its thousand golden arrows. Next to her chamber, the two old people lay awake. The sound of their conversation came to her ear at times through the pauses of the wind, like a softened and mournful echo of Elsie’s raving. Beneath her was the library, with its mysterious associations. The trees around it loomed against the bank of clouds, disconnected from their blackness only by the lightning that shot from it. All was gloom within and without; and amid the storm, her sobs rose and swelled unheard and unfelt, save by her own lonely heart. The lightning grew stronger and enveloped the whole landscape in broad, lurid sheets, revealing the country around and a sombre expanse of water beyond. At these times the new cottage stood out in broad relief, and the whole space of ground between that and the old mansion-house was momentarily illuminated. The scene gave the young woman a fierce sort of exaltation, while it filled her with grief. She thought of her husband and longed to shout his name aloud, to ask him to come forth from the bosom of the storm and tell her that he was yet alive. While this excitement was upon her, a crash of thunder broke over the house, and a rush of wind rent its way through the trees, scattering their foliage in torn masses from the boughs. Then came another fiery scroll, unfolding itself upon the wind, casting its blue radiance upon the earth, and kindling the sky with its forked light. The flash was so vivid and so prolonged that she started up with a cry of alarm. It was echoed by a shriek that cut sharper than steel through the noise of the storm. “See, see,” cried Elsie, who now stood beside her, “the lightning has got him; call him back; call him back, I say!”