She ran; he followed with the basket, went out to cover the seats of his car with mackintosh rugs and put up the hood, and came back, dampish, to discuss the situation. They told each other that it was only a shower, that it couldn't possibly, as they put it, have "set in." But it had; the landscape framed in the arch of the gateway lost color moment by moment, even the yellow of the gorse was blotted and obscured; the rain, which at first had fallen in a fitful, amateurish sort of way, settled down to business and fell in gray, diagonal lines, straight and sharp as ramrods. "And it's getting late," he said, "and your Highness will be hungry." "We've only just had tea," she reminded him. "Ah, but we've got some way to go," he told her. "Where _are_ we going?" "I had thought," he said, "of going to a place beyond Eastbourne; . . . my old nurse lives there. She's rather fond of me; . . . she'll have gotten supper for us. I thought you'd like it. It's a farm-house, rather a jolly one, and then I thought, if you liked, we could drive back to the Eastbourne hotel by moonlight." "That would have been nice." "But there won't be any moonlight. Perhaps we'd better go straight to the hotel." "But your nurse will expect you." "I can telegraph." "But she'll be so disappointed." "Why didn't I get a car that would shut up and be weather-tight? The rain will drift under that hood like the deluge." She laughed. "A little rain won't hurt us." "Your beautiful hat!" "I'll tie my ugly scarf around my head and put my beautiful hat under the rug. Come, don't let us disappoint your old nurse. No! It's not going to leave off; it's only taking breath to go on harder than ever." It was said afterward that never, in the memory of the oldest inhabitant, had there been such a storm of rain in those parts--rain without thunder, rain in full summer, rain without reason and without restraint. The rain drifted in, as he had said it would, and abruptly a wild wind arose and tore at the hood of the car, flapped her scarf in her eyes, and whipped their faces with sharp, stinging rain. He stopped at the village inn and brought her out ginger-brandy in a little glass shaped like a thistle-flower, "to keep the cold out." Also he went into the post-office and bought peppermint bull's-eyes, "to keep us warm," he said. "How admirably fortunate that we both like peppermint!" And the journey began in earnest, up hills that were torrents, through hollows that were ponds, where the water splashed like a yellow frill from their wheels as they rushed through it. One village street was like a river, and the men were busy with spades, digging through the hedge-banks channels by which the water might escape into the flooded fields.