She turned and faced him. Tiny streams of water ran from her hair down across her cheeks. A flash of lightning cut the darkness, illuminating the spot where Sam, now a broad-shouldered man, stood with the mud upon his clothes and the bewildered look upon his face. A sharp exclamation of surprise broke from her lips: “Hello, Sam! What are you doing here? You had better get in out of the rain.” “I like it here,” replied Sam, lifting his head and looking past her at the storm. Walking to the door and standing with her hand upon the knob, Mary looked into the darkness. “You have been a long time coming to see me,” she said, “come in.” Within the house, with the door closed, the rattle of the rain on the veranda roof sank to a subdued, quiet drumming. Piles of books lay upon a table in the centre of the room and there were other books on the shelves along the walls. On a table burned a student’s lamp and in the corners of the room lay heavy shadows. Sam stood by the wall near the door looking about with half-seeing eyes. Mary, who had gone to another part of the house and who now returned clad in a long cloak, looked at him with quick curiosity, and began moving about the room picking up odds and ends of woman’s clothing scattered on the chairs. Kneeling, she lighted a fire under some sticks piled in an open grate at the side of the room. “It was the storm made me want to sing,” she said self-consciously, and then briskly, “we shall have to be drying you out; you have fallen in the road and got yourself covered with mud.” From being morose and silent Sam became talkative. An idea had come into his mind. “I have come here courting,” he thought; “I have come to ask Mary Underwood to be my wife and live in my house.” The woman, kneeling by the blazing sticks, made a picture that aroused something that had been sleeping in him. The heavy cloak she wore, falling away, showed the round little shoulders imperfectly covered by the kimono, wet and clinging to them. The slender, youthful figure, the soft grey hair and the serious little face, lit by the burning sticks caused a jumping of his heart. “We are needing a woman in our house,” he said heavily, repeating the words that had been on his lips as he stumbled through the storm-swept streets and along the mud-covered roads. “We are needing a woman in our house, and I have come to take you there. “I intend to marry you,” he added, lurching across the room and grasping her roughly by the shoulders. “Why not? I am needing a woman.”