"Whisper! She is going to her final rest; Whisper! Life is growing dim within her breast!" Suddenly the sultry darkness was broken by a flash of lightning, followed by a low rumble of thunder. Swift rain-drops flashed down through the leaves upon that still, white face, and a summer storm broke in startling fury on the heated earth, drenching the motionless form with a steady downpour of water. The wind howled through the trees, breaking and twisting branches, tossing leaves about like feathers, and swelling the little creek to a brawling stream. All the while the blue sheets of lightning lighted up the sky with splendor, and gleamed through the tossing tree-branches down on the fair, quiet face seemingly locked in death's awful repose. For half an hour the war of the elements raged, then ceased as suddenly as it had begun, and the last faint gleam of lightning showed a startling change. The lips of Dainty Chase were parted in long, gasping breaths; the blue eyes were dilated in a blank and straining gaze. She rose slowly, staggeringly, to her feet, and as the black clouds parted overhead, and the full moon glimmered through, flooding the wet earth with splendor, as though diamonds strewed every blade of grass, she stepped, slowly, falteringly, down to the road, dragging her drenched body along aimlessly toward the open country that lay beyond. It would seem as if a miracle had been wrought, giving back life to the dead. But Dainty's draught of laudanum had been too small to induce death, and the wholesome bath of rain and the electric elements abroad in the air had combined to rouse her from a stupor that might otherwise have terminated fatally. Life--feeble, and faltering, yet still life--stole back along her veins to her numb heart, and set it beating again. With a strength almost incredible after the terrible week she had endured, she wandered slowly down the road, obeying blind impulse, not reason; for her mind was yet clouded by delirium, and she had as yet no realization of who she was or where she was. Her mind was a pitiful blank, and her lips babbled vacant nothings as she dragged herself on and on, further and further away from Ellsworth, and into the lonely woods, unconsciously leaving the beaten track, and pursuing a lonely bridle path that led her into the very heart of the forest. Now and then, when her strength failed, she would drop down and rest; then start up and wander on again, aimlessly and drearily, until she seemed to be lost in a maze of thick woodland that looked like the haunts of savage creatures and crawling serpents, whose dens were fitly chosen among these jagged gray rocks. "And when on the earth she sank to sleep, If slumber her eyelids knew, She lay where the deadly vine doth weep Its venomous tear, and nightly steep The flesh in blistering dew, And near her the she-wolf stirred the brake, And the copper snake breathed in her ear."