Unnoticed by the four interested men, a small compact-looking gray cloud had come sweeping down from the horizon above the lake and was scudding across the sky toward Arite. A sudden sharp crack of thunder interrupted their conversation. "Hello, a storm!" exclaimed the Chemist, looking out over the lake. "You've never seen one, have you? Come upstairs." They followed him into the house and upstairs to its flat roof. From this point of vantage they saw that the house was built with an interior courtyard or _patio_. Looking down into this courtyard from the roof they could see a little, splashing fountain in its center, with flower beds, a narrow gray path, and several small white benches. The roof, which was guarded with a breast-high parapet around both its inner and outer edges, was beautifully laid out with a variety of flowers and with trellised flower-bearing vines. In one corner were growing a number of small trees with great fan-shaped leaves of blue and bearing a large bell-shaped silver blossom. One end of the roof on the lake side was partially enclosed. Towards this roofed enclosure the Chemist led his friends. Within it a large fiber hammock hung between two stone posts. At one side a depression in the floor perhaps eight feet square was filled with what might have been blue pine needles, and a fluffy bluish moss. This rustic couch was covered at one end by a canopy of vines bearing a little white flower. As they entered the enclosure, it began to rain, and the Chemist slid forward several panels, closing them in completely. There were shuttered windows in these walls, through which they could look at the scene outside--a scene that with the coming storm was weird and beautiful beyond anything they had ever beheld. The cloud had spread sufficiently now to blot out the stars from nearly half of the sky. It was a thick cloud, absolutely opaque, and yet it caused no appreciable darkness, for the starlight it cut off was negligible and the silver radiation from the lake had more than doubled in intensity. Under the strong wind that had sprung up the lake assumed now an extraordinary aspect. Its surface was raised into long, sweeping waves that curved sharply and broke upon themselves. In their tops the silver phosphorescence glowed and whirled until the whole surface of the lake seemed filled with a dancing white fire, twisting, turning and seeming to leap out of the water high into the air. Several small sailboats, square, flat little catamarans, they looked, showed black against the water as they scudded for shore, trailing lines of silver out behind them.