Emmie had gone more than half-way to the dwelling of Jael, when the thunder-cloud above her burst in a storm compared to which that one which she had encountered on the evening of her arrival was but as the play of summer lightning. Never before had the trembling girl heard such deafening peals as those which now shook the welkin, while the rattling hail descended with fury. Branches above and on either side creaked and snapped in the gale, and some were whirled with violence across the path of the maiden. Emmie started, shuddered, and drew her shawl over her head for protection against the blast and the hail, but still she struggled onwards. She uttered no shriek, but she gasped forth a prayer; it was the moan of one in anguish, not the cry of one in despair. That storm was one of the most terrible which had ever been known in England. The newspapers on the following day recorded many a wreck on the coast, many an accident in inland localities. They told of stacks of chimneys blown down, and a church spire struck by lightning; they recorded how cattle had been killed by the fall of a tree, and a sportsman in the field struck dead with his gun in his hand. Emmie always remembered that storm as a horrible dream, and wondered how she had been strengthened to endure what terrified nature so shrank from. But personal fear was partly neutralized by a yet more absorbing fear; to gain tidings of Bruce, Emmie felt that she would bear the shock of the fiercest storm that ever swept over the earth. The maiden emerged unharmed from the wood, safe at least from danger of injury by lightning-struck tree, or branches torn off by the gale. She had been preserved through one terrible peril; and would not the Power that had helped her hitherto sustain and protect to the end? Emmie had now reached a road which skirted an open heath, and the lone dwelling of Jael Harper stood not a hundred yards before her. It was a narrow, two-storied house, standing in a small garden; both house and garden were whitened with snow, as was the little path which connected the door with the road. The hail had spent itself in that sharp and furious downfall, but the blinding lightning flashed faster than ever its forked, jagged darts through the sky. As Emmie with desperate resolution approached the garden-gate of that dwelling which was as fearful to her as a lion's den might have been, she noticed on the snow-covered road the tracks of cartwheels, and on the garden pathway those of feet. The latter were all in a direction which showed that though several persons might have quitted the house since the fall of snow on the preceding night, no one could have entered it. Emmie leaned for a few moments against the low garden-paling to gather her thoughts; the noise of the storm and the terror of her mind made it difficult even to think.