Monday was the day of the great deliverance, the day that was fixed for Frida Tancred\'s flight. And, as if it meant to mark an era and a hegira and the beginning of revolution, it distinguished itself from other days by suitable signs and portents. It dawned [Pg 302] through a brooding haze that threatened heat, then changed its mind, thickened and massed itself for storm. While he was dressing, Durant was made aware of the meteorological disturbance by an incessant tap-tap on the barometer as the Colonel consulted his oracle in the hall. The official announcement was made at breakfast.

"There is a change in the glass," said the Colonel. "Mr. Durant brought the fine weather with him and Miss Chatterton is taking it away."

"I\'m taking something else away beside the weather," said she.

But the spirit of prophecy was upon him.

"To judge by to-day\'s forecast, I think we shall see Frida back again before the fine weather."

Whereupon Durant smiled and Miss Chatterton laughed, which gave him an agreeable sense of being witty as well as prophetic.

By ten o\'clock the hand of the barometer had crept far past "Change"; by noon it had swung violently to "Stormy, with much rain"; by lunchtime a constrained and awkward dialogue was broken by the rude voice of the thunder. The Colonel took out his watch, timed the thunder and lightning, and calculated the approaches of the storm. "Seven miles away from us at present," said he.

It hung so low that the growling and groaning seemed to come from the woods round Coton Manor; the landscape darkened to a metallic purplish green, then paled to the livid color of jade under a sallow sky. There was a swift succession of transformation scenes, when, between the bursts of thunder, the park, swathed in sheet lightning, shot up behind the windows, now blue, now amethyst, now rose, now green. Then the storm suddenly shifted its quarters and broke [Pg 303] through a rampart of solid darkness piled high in the southwest.

"Fifteen seconds," said the Colonel, "between that flash and the thunder."

Among these phenomena the Colonel moved like a little gentleman enchanted; he darted to and fro, and in and out, as if the elements were his natural home; his hurried notes in the little memorandum book outsped the lightning. For the last thirty years there had not been such weather in the meteorological history of Wickshire.

But the storm was only in its playful infancy; the forked lightning and the rain were yet to come. The last train up, timed to meet the express at the junction, left Whithorn-in-Arden at 3.10, and it was a good hour\'s drive to the station. As they toyed with the lightning on their plates Durant and Miss Chatterton looked at Frida. Fate, the weather, and the Colonel, a trinity of hostile powers, were arrayed against her, and the three were one.

At the stroke of two the Colonel remarked blandly, "There will be no driving to the station to-day, so I have countermanded the brougham."

They were dressed ready for the journey, and, as the Colonel spoke Frida got up, drew down her veil and put on her gloves.

"That was a pity," she said quietly, "seeing that we\'ve got to go."

The Colonel was blander than ever; he waved his hand. "Go, by all means," said he, "but not in my brougham. There I put my foot down."

("Not there, not there, oh, gallant Colonel," said Durant to himself, "but where you have always put it, on Frida\'s lovely neck.")

She started, looked steadily at her father, then, to [Pg 304] Durant\'s surprise, she shrugged her shoulders; not as an Englishwoman shrugs them, but in the graceful Continental manner. The movement suggested that the foreign strain in her was dominant at the moment; it further implied that she was shaking her neck free from the Colonel\'s foot. She walked to the window and looked out upon the storm. With the neck strained slightly forward, her nostrils quivering, her whole figure eager and lean and tense, she looked like some fine and nervous animal, say a deerhound ready to slip from the leash.

As she looked there was a sound as if heaven were ripped asunder, and the forked lightning hurled itself from that dark rampart in the southwest and went zig-zagging against the pane. "Only ten seconds," said the Colonel; "the storm is bursting right over our heads."

Frida too had consulted her watch; she turned suddenly, rang the bell, and gave orders to a trembling footman. "Tell Randall to put Polly in the dogcart. He must drive to the station at once."

The answer came back from the stables that Randall had shut himself into the loose box and covered himself with straw, "to keep the lightning off of him. He dursn\'t go near a steel bit, not if it was to save his life, m\'m, and as for driving to the station——"

It was too true; Randall, horse-breaker, groom and coachman, excellent, invaluable creature at all other times, was a brainless coward in a thunderstorm.

"If we don............