“And echo answers——” Lucius added, managing to get his head and shoulders under the divan, and thrusting with arms and legs to get more of himself under. But a chime of laughter from the doorway answered in place of echo. “What are you doing, Lucius?” Mrs. Thomas inquired. “Swimming lessons? I never saw anything——” And laughter so overcame her that she could speak no further, but dropped into a chair, her handkerchief to her mouth. Lucius emerged crabwise, and placed a cribbage-peg upon the table, but made no motion to continue the game. Instead he dusted himself uselessly, lit a cigar, and sat. “Luddie’s all right,” said the lady, having recovered her calmness. “I think probably something he ate at dinner upset him a little. Anyhow, he was all right as soon as he got upstairs. Annie’s sitting with him and telling him stories.” “I wonder if that lightning struck anything this afternoon,” Lucius said absently. “Some of it seemed mighty near.” “It was awful.” “Do you remember,” Lucius asked her, “when you first began to be nervous about it?” “Oh, I’ve always been that way, ever since I was a little child. I haven’t the faintest idea how it got hold of me. Children just get afraid of certain things, it seems to me, and that’s all there is to it. You know how Luddie is about lightning, John.” John admitted that he knew how Luddie was about lightning. “I do,” was all he said. Mrs. Thomas’s expression became charmingly fond, even a little complacent. “I suppose he inherits it from me,” she said. “My mother has that fear to this day,” Lucius remarked. “And I have it, too, but I didn’t inherit it from her.” “How do you know?” his cousin asked quickly. “What makes you think you didn’t inherit it?” “Because my father used to tell me that when I was three and four years old he would sit out on the porch during a thunder-storm, and hold me in his lap, and every time the thunder came both of us would laugh, and shout ‘Boom!’ Children naturally like a big noise. But when I got a little bit older and more imaginative, and began to draw absurd conclusions from things, I found that my mother was frightened during thunder-storms—though she tried her best to conceal it—and, of course, seeing _her_ frightened, I thought something pretty bad must be the matter. So the fear got fastened on me, and I can’t shake it off though I’m thirty-five years old. Curious thing it is!” Mrs. Thomas’s brilliant eyes were fixed upon her cousin throughout this narrative with an expression at first perplexed, then reproachful, finally hostile. A change, not subtle but simple and vivid, came upon her face, while its habitual mobility departed, leaving it radiantly still, with a fierce smoldering just underneath. How deep and fast her breathing became, was too easily visible.