With my rising, however, a sigh broke from it, and a little stir of the limbs, so that my heart that had fallen leaped up again with gladness. Then he looked up at me standing above him, and a smile passed like a gleam of sunlight over his features. “I always loved you, my son Renalt,” he murmured, and, murmuring, fell into a light trance once more. The following day there was no change in his condition. I could have thought him floating out of life on that tide of dreaming thoughts that seemed to bear him up so gently and so easily. When, at moments, he would rise to consciousness of my presence, he would nod to me and smile; and again sink back on the pillow of gracious somnolence. I had been sitting reading to myself in my father’s room and all was glowing silence about me, when a sudden clap at the window-casement made me start. I jumped to my feet and looked out. A vast gloomy curtain of cloud was drawing up from the east; even as I looked, some shafts of its bitterness drove through the joints of the lattice, stabbing at me with points of ice, and I shivered, though the sunlight was still upon me. The storm came on with incredible speed; within five minutes of my rising clouds of hail were flogging the streets, and from a whirling fog of night jangle of innumerable voices hooting and whistling broke like a besieging cloud of Goths upon the ancient capital. CHAPTER L. STRICKEN DOWN. For ten minutes, during which the city was blind with hail, I could see nothing but a thicket of white strings dense as the threads in a loom; hear nothing but the pounding crash of thunder and fierce hiss and clatter of the driving stones. Then darkness gathered within and without, and down came the storm with an access of fury that seemed verily as if it must flatten out the town like a scattered ants’ nest. So infernal for the moment was the uproar that I hurried to my father’s side, fearful that his soul might actually yield itself to the raging tyranny of its surroundings. He lay unmoved in the same quiet stupor of the faculties, unconscious, apparently, that anything out of nature’s custom was enacting near him. As suddenly as it had begun, the white deluge ceased, as though the last of its reservoirs above were emptied. The reaction to comparative silence was so intense that in the first joy of it one scarcely harkened to the voice of a great wind that had risen and was following on the heels of the storm, to batten like a camp follower on the wreckage of the battle that had swept by. For four weary days it flew, going past like an endless army, and laden clouds were its parks of artillery and the swords of its bitterness never rested in their scabbards.