Soon there was the same thickening, the same opacity in the atmosphere of the remote plain that stretched to the mountain's foot. It was invisible now, the Mount Ventoux, the Mountain of the Winds. And as the plain grew dark the Rhone as suddenly whitened. It whitened and whitened, nearer and nearer Avignon; then a dull distant roar became audible, steadily increasing. A violent brief squall shook the villa. What! so frightened already? Poor children, it is nothing yet! Over the terrified plain, over the foaming river, comes the MISTRAL, careering in his strength! Well for you, walls of Avignon, that you were built for the shocks of battle! well for thee, most especially, O palace of the transplanted Papacy, that thy fortress-heights were erected less for pleasure than for resistance! Louder and louder, nearer and nearer! How the trees bend like fishing-rods! Crash, crash--they break before the tempest. What a clatter against the windows! It is a volley of pebbles that the Mistral carries with it as a torrent does. Bang, bang--the shutters are torn off their iron hinges and pitched nobody knows where--into the court, on the roof-top, it may be, or into the neighbor's garden! The intensity of the noise made all human voices inaudible. The Mistral likes to make an uproar--it is his amusement, when he comes to Avignon from his mountain. And he whistles at once in a thousand chimneys, as a boy whistles in two steel keys; and he makes such a clatter with destroying things, that the most insured house-property leaves no peace to its possessor. But straight in the midst of his path rise the towers of the fortress-palace, and Peter Obreri, its architect, knows in the world of spirits that they resist the Mistral yet. But alas for our poor little Alice! This wind does not suit her at all; this unceasing, this wearisome wind--this agitating, terrible wind! She did not fear death before, in the calm serene weather, when it seemed that her soul might rise in the blue ether, and be borne by floating angels. But to go out into the bleak, stern tempest--to leave _his_ encircling arms, and be dashed no one knows whither along the desolate, unfamiliar Provence, with twigs, and dead leaves, and pebbles, and that choking cloud of sand! "Forgive me these foolish fancies," she prayed, from the depths of this horror. "My soul knows her way to the haven of thy rest, O Lord, my Guide and my Redeemer!" CHAPTER XXXIV. JACOB OGDEN FREE AGAIN. Early in the month of February there came a black-edged letter to Arkwright Lodge, with a French stamp upon it. The letter was from Philip Stanburne, and it announced Alice Stedman's death. Two days after the arrival of that letter another letter arrived at Milend for Jacob Ogden. It bore the Whittlecup post-mark, and had an exact outward resemblance to several other letters which had come from the same place, but its contents were of a new character.