They drove quietly through the dusty, sultry streets, and came in a few minutes to Lammermoor. Mrs. Raymond conversed all the time in a low, monotonous voice, like the tones of some one talking in their sleep, chiefly in defence of her husband, though Jeannie had said no word about him.

“Colonel Raymond is so very strong himself,” she said, “and I think sometimes that he doesn’t quite make allowance for the children. But he disagrees with me, and I dare say he is right. He always finds a good walk, he says, the best cure for a headache or a feeling of tiredness; he says such things are best walked off. But with children, you know, it may be different; they are so easily tired, and the Colonel always walks very fast. But Maria’s walk yesterday certainly did her no good, and my husband was as anxious as myself to-day that some one should see her, and the doctors were all out. That was why I came for you, and it is so good of you to come. Colonel Raymond is terrified for the child; he does not at all like illness in the house. He has seen so much illness in In—in his service. And here we are!”

Jeannie followed Mrs. Raymond up the narrow gravel walk and up the three stone steps, with balls at the top and bottom, into Lammermoor. A strong smell of tobacco and camphor was apparent in the hall.

“Colonel Raymond says smoking is the best disinfectant,” explained his wife, “and he has been sprinkling camphor about in the study and in the dining-room. He says camphor is a good disinfectant, too.”

Jeannie sniffed.

“I should recommend you to open all the doors and windows in the house and let in some fresh air,” she said. “Fresh air is better than either camphor or tobacco.”

“I will tell my husband what you say,” said Mrs. Raymond. “Will you step into the drawing-room a moment, Miss Avesham? I know Robert would like to see you.”

“I really haven’t time,” said Jeannie. “I must be back at the hospital at three.”

“Then perhaps you will come upstairs straight?” said the other.

The house reeked of the Colonel’s disinfectants as they mounted the stairs. On the first floor the door into his dressing-room was just open, disclosing a view of him putting some clothes into a small valise, with a cigar in his mouth, and in his shirt-sleeves.

“Oh, here is Robert,” said Mrs. Raymond, in her thin voice. “Robert, here is Miss Avesham very kindly come to see Maria. What are you doing, dear?”

The Colonel treated Jeannie to his best military bow, and took the cigar out of his mouth, but his usual heartiness was absent from his greeting.

“Very kind of you, very kind, I am sure, Miss Avesham,” he said, “to come and see our poor little Maria. The hot weather—she feels the hot weather, poor child.”

A curious, grim look came into Jeannie’s face. Like most people who have the salt of courage necessary for the conduct of life she felt unkindly toward cowardice. She noticed also that this bluff and gallant gentleman did not advance to meet her, but rather retreated farther into his room. She remembered also the confidence that Miss Clifford had made her on the stair-case, and she hardened her heart.

“How do you do, Colonel Raymond?” she said, still advancing toward him, but the Colonel retreated behind his open luggage.

“What are you doing, Robert?” asked his wife again, in the same voice.

Colonel Raymond did not reply at once, and Jeannie did not break his silence.

“Well, I’m packing,” he said, at length. “If there’s illness in the house a man is only in the way. Better make myself scarce, you know; better make myself scarce.”

Jeannie looked at him fixedly for a moment. Then, breaking into a smile:

“You need not be frightened,” she said. “For any one well over forty there is really no risk, even when typhoid is about. And I thought you said it was only the hot weather that had tried your daughter. Well, Mrs. Raymond, I have to be back at the hospital very soon, and I think we had better go and see your daughter at once.”

She turned her back on the Colonel, and followed Mrs. Raymond to a higher story.

“My husband is very careful about infection,” said the latter as they mounted the stairs. “That is so right, is it not? But I did not know he was thinking of going away.”

“He is quite right to be careful of infection,” said Jeannie. “But there is no need for him to go; and, indeed, we do not know if there is any reason yet.”

Maria slept in the same room with one of her sisters, the eldest having the dignity of a room to herself. Jeannie cast one glance at the little haggard, fevered face, and took out her thermometer.

“Put it under your tongue, dear,” she said, “and keep it there till I take it away. Don’t bite it. No, it’s not medicine; it doesn’t taste nasty.”

She glanced at it at the end of half a minute.

“That’s all right,” she said, reassuringly. “How do you feel?”

“Headache,” piped the little feeble voice from the bed.

“We’ll soon make that all right then,” said Jeannie. “Now lie quite still and covered up, and your mother will come to you again.”

“And I sha’n’t go a walk to-day?” said Maria.

“No, you shall stay in bed and rest. You are a little tired.”

Jeannie closed the door when they came out.

“Yes, she has high fever,” she said to Mrs. Raymond. “Go and sit with her, and don’t let her raise herself in bed. I am afraid it is typhoid, but we can’t tell yet. I will see you again before I leave the house. I am just going to speak to your husband, unless you will take the responsibility of what you do.”

“You must speak to him, then,” said Mrs. Raymond. “But please remember, dear Miss Avesham, how careful he is about infection.”

“Yes, I will remember,” said Jeannie.

The dressing-room door was shut when she went downstairs again, and she knocked at it. It flew open, and it seemed to Jeannie that the Colonel thought he was opening to his wife.

“I want to speak to you, Colonel Raymond,” she said. “Oh, please don’t apologize for the state of your room. I have only a minute, and you need not come downstairs.”

“You have seen Maria?” asked the Colonel.

“Yes; she is ill. She must be treated as if she had typhoid.”

“God bless my soul!” exclaimed the Colonel. “Why, I have seen men die of it like flies!”

“They are dying of it like flies here,” said Jeannie. “Now I don’t want to dissuade you from going away, though for a man of your age there is really no risk. Still there is no telling what fright will do. If you were frightened of whooping-cough you might still catch it. But I want to know this. Will you send your daughter to the hospital? She will be as well looked after there as here; it will take anxiety off your wife, and you can take the other two children away with you. Might I trouble you to open the window? This mixture of camphor and cigar is overpowering.”

“She would go as a paying patient?” asked the Colonel.

“Of course,” said Jeannie.

“Then, upon my soul, Miss Avesham, I think we’ll keep her here. She’ll be better looked after in her own home. My wife is an excellent nurse, and any little delicacies she might require will be more easily supplied at home.”

“As you will,” said Jeannie. “If, as I am afraid, it is typhoid, you will of course have to have two trained nurses, by day and night. Mrs. Raymond told me the decision would be with you.”

Colonel Raymond looked undecided, and slipped on his coat.

“Very difficult to decide,” he said, “very difficult. Which do you recommend, Miss Avesham?”

“It is difficult to choose,” said Jeannie. “Ah, it lightened again; I hope we shall have rain. As you say, perhaps she would be more comfortable here. Please tell me at once. I am going straight back to the hospital, and I will tell them to send an ambulance if you decide she should go.”

“Well, she shall go, she shall go,” said the Colonel. “Nothing like proper treatment.”

“I think you have decided right,” said Jeannie. “The other child who sleeps in the same room must, of course, be removed at once. You have a spare room? If not, no doubt you could make her a bed here in your dressing-room.”

“That would be possible,” said the Colonel.

“And since the case is removed,” said Jeannie, “it will no longer be necessary for you to go away. Please don’t trouble to come down, as I can let myself out.”

As Jeannie left the house she noticed that the south was black with cloud. The texture of it was different to what it had been during the last fortnight of congested weather. The sky was no longer leaden and dry, but moist and dark with imminent rain. A little wind was beginning to blow in fitful gusts from the same quarter, and leaves nearly dead danced with clouds of whirling dust about the road. Already in the air was the hint of a change; her heart was lighter, for the two hours had been like a caress to her troubled spirit. She had been worn with fruitless effort; the collar of the suffering world chafed her, but one hand brought healing to her, and her heart was holpen.

She reported the case of probable typhoid to a doctor, and went back to her ward. Nurse James met her with a smiling face, and when Nurse James smiled it was not without reason.

“That girl you left so ill this morning is no worse,” she said. “If anything, she is a little stronger. Dr. Maitland thinks that the sudden drop in the temperature may be after all a sudden turn for the better. He says it occasionally happens. Certainly if there had been perforation we should have known by now. Watch her very carefully.”

All the afternoon remote lightning winked distantly in the sky, and the answering thunder got ever gradually louder and more continuous. The wind had veered into the north-west, and was coming in sudden claps and buffets of hot air, and the storm, a distant rack of coppery, hard-edged cloud, distinct and different from the heavy, soft vapours overhead, was approaching slowly from the opposite quarter. The oppression of the air was as intolerable as ever, and strangely more acute, the remote heavens seemed to be pressing down on the earth like a hot lid over a stewing pot. But in the ward there was a general feeling of cheerfulness, easy to perceive, hard to define, a survival doubtless in man of the curious instinct in animals which makes them smell an approaching storm and warns the domestic sort that an earthquake is coming. The earth and the fever-stricken town were waiting for a change, which could not be for the worse. Of them all, only the girl who had been almost despaired of that morning lay quite still and apathetic, and again and again Jeannie went to her bedside betwixt hope and fear.

About five the storm burst in riotous elements. For an hour before that the strain had been almost unbearable. The forked flashes of lightning, the dry growl of the thunder had approached nearer and nearer, and all the earth seemed to pause, finger on lip, for the catastrophe. Now and then a few rain-drops as big as pennies fell down upon the pavements, and vanished again like a breath on a frosty morning on the hot, thirsty stones. Then suddenly the heavens burst, a ribbon of blue fire leaped downward from the zenith, and the noise of the thunder was as if the sky had cracked. One woman half raised herself in bed and cried, “Lord, have mercy!” but at the end of the words came a sound as if a thousand snakes had hissed in the street outside, the blessed whisper of rain, and all was changed.

The girl who was so ill moved slightly and laid one hand outside the bed-clothes; the woman who had cried aloud lay back in bed smiling; Jeannie felt a pulse rise in her throat and subside again, and outside the hiss of the snakes changed to a drumming on the roof, which got gradually louder and more insistent. Perpendicularly it fell, like rods of steel, and as the seconds added themselves into minutes the roofs, drains, and gutter-pipes began to gurgle and chuckle to themselves, and never was there a song so sweet. These guttural sounds grew ever fuller, and in a few minutes, with a great splash, they choked and overflowed in bubbling laughter. Again and yet again the lightning tore a path through the clouds, and at each reverberation in the baptism of fire the earth grew regenerate and young. The hot, stifling smell of the last six weeks turned to something infinitely fresh and vigorous, and down the pavements and over the roads began to flow the flushing streams.

Five was the hour of the afternoon milk and beef-tea, and Carmel hour, as it seemed to Jeannie, of the evening sacrifice. Food and the healing rain were poured out, a sign of His hand, abundant, health-giving. Exultantly she went her rounds, and found smiling faces. One only did not smile, for the girl lay in deep, natural sleep, as if the racket and tumult outside were a lullaby to her. Outside it had grown very dark; the wind had ceased; but as if to compensate for the darkness, from moment to moment an intolerable brilliance of lightning made a tenfold brightness. It was as if the town was beleaguered by the artillery of the sky, and from right and left fired unceasingly the guns of heaven. In the intervals between the flashes colour was blotted out from the world, dark roofs and black trees huddled together to meet a sky scarcely more luminous. Then in a moment the colour would be restored. The geraniums in the boxes outside the window, black before, leaped into their scarlet liveries; the black elm-tops, a dark blob, became an outlined company of green leaves, and the tiled roofs of the houses were red once more. A noise as of a hundred sacks of marbles poured out on to a wooden floor endorsed the truths, and once again the world became shadow and the click of gutters.

By six the first violence of the storm was momentarily abated. Sullen, blessed rain-clouds hung ready to burst, but when Jeannie and Miss Fortescue came to leave the hospital they passed unwetted down to Bolton Street. In Jeannie’s head an easy melody of love and joy bubbled and repeated, and listening to it she was silent. But Aunt Em spoke.

“I wish I had brought goloshes,” she said. “But I am glad this rain has come; it will flush the drains.”

It was Miss Fortescue’s habit, though those who knew her best least suspected it, to commend herself and those she loved to the special care of God every night. Though she never talked about religion, there was nothing in the world more real to her than her communion with things unseen. But she never lost sight of her undoubted connection also with things seen, and to-night her devotions were tepid. For at dinner Jeannie had been altogether unaccountable, the obsession of gravity and responsibility which had beleaguered her during the past week was altogether absent, and Miss Fortescue wondered what had driven it away. She had laughed and spilled things with the mastery of custom, and after dinner she had stopped in the dining-room with Arthur, smoking a cigarette.

Now Jeannie’s cigarette was, properly speaking, not a cigarette at all, but a barometer. It argued a very rare content and an almost passionate acceptance of the present circumstances of life. For weeks past, and more especially since this epidemic had come to the town, Jeannie could no more have smoked than she could have flown, and something, so argued Miss Fortescue, must have occurred to send her needle up this sky-high weather. The thunder-storm and the clearing of the air no doubt were predisposing causes, and so also might be reckoned the wonderful turn for the better of the case of the girl whose life had been despaired of that morning. But Miss Fortescue was not content to accept these alone as sufficient reasons. They would have occasioned relief, but no more, and this sudden rise in the barometer was due to the removal of a more marked depression. So, instead of going to bed, she put on her dressing-gown, and knocked softly at Jeannie’s door, and receiving no answer went in.

The room was brilliantly lighted. Jeannie seemed to have lit all the candles she could find, and she herself was standing far from the door by the wide-flung window and looking out into the night. She too had taken off her dress and put on a short-sleeved dressing-gown, which left her arms bare to nearly the shoulder. Her hair was hanging down her back in a great black river as far as her waist, and her face, nearly in profile, was cut like a cameo against the dark square of the night. The rain had begun to fall heavily again, and the room was filled with the “sh-sh-sh” of the drinking grass. Just as Miss Fortescue stood at the door the blackness outside turned to a sheet of blue flame, and the thousand rods of the rain became for a moment a prism of colour. Jeannie started, and turning half round saw her aunt. A smile of great happiness played round her mouth, and she held up her head, listening. In another half second came the great gongs of thunder in answer to the lightning, and she laughed with pleasure.

“Hear them, hear them!” she cried. “Oh, Aunt Em, isn’t it splendid? And the rain! Oh, the rain! Have you come for a talk? That is good also, for I cannot go to bed yet. Let us pull out our chairs to the window.”

Now, Miss Fortescue hated thunder-storms and snakes and German bands, but she hated thunder-storms the most. But Jeannie’s happiness was too infectious to be denied, and she sat down in the chair by her.

“Oh, I am so happy!” cried Jeannie. “Listen at the rivers down the gravel walks. There won’t be a flower in the garden to-morrow.”

“I don’t know that that is altogether an advantage,” said Aunt Em. “Haven’t you got a better reason than that?”

“Hundreds,” said Jeannie. “I am sane again. I was looking at things awry, and I have been put right.”

“Who put you right?” asked Aunt Em.

“Why, Mr. Collingwood!” said Jeannie. “He was here this afternoon.”

“I didn’t know that,” said Miss Fortescue.

Jeannie looked at her with frank surprise.

“That never occurred to me,” she said. “Now I come to think of it, you couldn’t have known. He came just after lunch, and we talked together for about half an hour.”

Again a ribbon of instantaneous flame was dangled from the sky, and the thunder replied with a short, unechoed clap. Miss Fortescue’s chair was a little behind Jeannie’s, and as the girl leaned eagerly forward at the lightning she saw the bright, wholesome colour flood her face and arms. And when she turned to her, the transcendent brilliance in her face was a thing to wonder at.

“Yes, even that,” said Jeannie, employing the figure of speech known as hiatus. “Oh, Aunt Em! And to think that you never knew all I have known so well this afternoon.”

There was something infinitely simple and noble in the girl’s gesture of happiness, and Miss Fortescue’s eyes were suddenly dim.

“Jeannie, you mean it?” she cried.

“I mean it. I did not mean to tell you yet, yet I never meant not to. Have you guessed, or have I told you? I hardly know. It matters less. But so it is!”

“Jeannie, Jeannie!” cried Miss Fortescue, and the girl was folded in her arms.

For a moment she lay there, her face buried on Miss Fortescue’s shoulder, her hair lying in coils, her arms, warm, supple, clinging, clasped round her neck, and for half a quarter of that embrace jealousy of all the insolent happiness of youth rose bitter in the elder woman’s throat. Here was a young life, one very dear to her, made suddenly complete, and with a pang as overpowering as it was brief, Miss Fortescue raged inwardly over her unfinished, incompleted life. But the next moment all in her that was womanly, all that was true and good rose triumphant. Her outward cynicism, her assumed hardness, fell from her like a peeled bark, and the heart of the tree was sound. But Jeannie had felt the slack return to her eager embrace, and she raised her head.

“You do not understand what it means to me,” she said. “You have never known.”

But Miss Fortescue’s arms closed round her.

“Yes, dear, I have known,” she said, “though that was one of the things you never knew about me. I have known, dear Jeannie——”

Jeannie raised herself to a kneeling position by her chair, and the inimitable unselfishness of love stung her heart.

“I am a little brute,” she said, quietly. “First forgive me, and then we will talk.”

She looked up in the other’s face, and for a moment hardly recognised her. The plain, strong face was no longer there; a dim-eyed girl sat in the chair above her.

“That is no word from me to you, Jeannie,” she said. “It is an insolence to say one forgives those one loves. But I have known.”

A crowd of confused, scarcely remembered moments suddenly sprang into Jeannie’s mind. She looked like one awakened suddenly from sleep by a loud noise.

“Tell me,” she said.

Miss Fortescue shook her head.

“The thing is past,” she replied. “I have buried it.”

Again the wild bull’s-eye of the storm flashed through the window, and Miss Fortescue drew instinctively away. But Jeannie’s arm detained her.

“Do tell me,” she said again, “unless it would hurt you.”

“It would not hurt me,” said Miss Fortescue.

Jeannie suddenly stood up.

“What do you mean?” she said. “Is it possible that I guess, Aunt Em?”

Again the light of youth flooded Miss Fortescue’s face.

“Yes, dear, it is possible,” she said.

“My father,” said Jeannie, simply.

“Yes, your father.”

Jeannie sat down on the arm of Miss Fortescue’s chair, and kissed her impulsively.

“Oh, Aunt Em, Aunt Em,” she said. “And I never knew. Yet that was natural. I could not have known, could I, until I was able to know, until to-day in fact, and it was like you, so like you, to give us no possibility of guessing. Tell me all, unless it is bitter to you.”

“There is no bitterness about love,” said Miss Fortescue, gently. “How it is possible for a woman to love and be bitter, even though her love is not returned, I cannot guess. But once, so I thought, my love was returned. I do not know; I may be wrong. Then he met your mother, and—and they were very happy. And how, unless I was the lowest of God’s creatures, could I wish anything more than that my sister and the man I loved should love each other.”

There was a long silence, broken only by the steady hiss of the rain on the grass outside. Jeannie’s head lay on Miss Fortescue’s shoulder, but she did not speak. The occasion lay beyond the realm of words, and could be met only by that great silence which is the language of hearts. The familiar figure of her aunt had been suddenly transformed, her care and protection for the children of her sister had on the moment become to Jeannie a thing more sweet and tender than she had ever dreamed of, the mask playful, severe, grotesque even, which she had known was only a mask, was removed, and how fair-featured a soil lay below. She could not estimate the sweet strength which even then had been so powerless to imbitter, nor what must have been the daily sacrifice in her life. It was not for her either, she felt, to judge her father. Perhaps, as Miss Fortescue had said, he had never loved her, or at any rate had never known she loved him. Jeannie was only ten when her mother died, and since then Aunt Em had always lived with them, a mother—how truly so, she never knew till this moment—to all three of them.

But presently Miss Fortescue went on, still without any tremor in her voice.

“So all this has been another bond between us, dear Jeannie,” she said. “I have always felt that as the sister of your mother and as a woman who loved your father, God, in that inscrutable way of His, gave me a peculiar charge. And the charge has been very sweet to me. Oh, my dear, I don’t say it was always easy. It would be foolish to pretend that, but nothing that is easy is worth doing. That is always a consolation—no, not a consolation, but a strength—when one’s way seems difficult. Perhaps all difficult things are not worth doing, but it is only among them that you find anything that is. And when a difficult thing lies so clearly in one’s path as this, one may take it for granted that one is meant to try one’s hand at it. And I have tried, Jeannie.”

Jeannie’s face was still buried on her shoulder.

“Oh, Aunt Em, Aunt Em,” was all she could say.

Aunt Em stroked her hair gently.

“And then this unreasonable old aunt of yours,” she continued, “in order to crown her efforts, comes like a burglar into your room and makes you cry.”

Jeannie lifted her head and smiled at her through her tears.

“I am not crying unhappily,” she said; “and really, I am going to cry no more. I was crying only because things were so big, and the world was so fine, and I was so little. Is that reasonable, do you think? I rather believe it is. Oh, Aunt Em, if I could only tell you how I honor you!”

“I prefer that you should love me a little, Jeannie; that is quite enough. Spare me a little from Jack; there will be plenty left. Oh, my dear, I am so glad! I always liked that rude young man who painted your portrait. Weeks ago I knew he loved you, and I hoped—I hoped that you might love him.”

“How could I help it?” cried Jeannie. “And what have I done that this great gift should come to me?”

“You have grown up into an attractive young woman,” remarked Aunt Em, with a brisk return to her more usual attitude toward life, “and he into an attractive young man. That, to judge by the marriages one often sees, is more than enough.”

Jeannie laughed.

“Oh, I am happy, I am happy!” she cried. “What a day I have had: that girl turned the corner, the blessed rain fell, I talked with Jack in the garden, and I have talked to you.”

“And now you are going to bed,” said Miss Fortescue. “So I shall be off to my room. Kiss me, my dear, once more.”

She rose as she spoke, and Jeannie, bending from her height, kissed her on the forehead and on the cheeks, and without another word Aunt Em took up her candle and went back to her room.

It was already after midnight and Jeannie undressed quickly and, putting out her illumination of candles, got into bed. How long she lay there without sleeping she did not know, but at last the myriad-voiced rain outside blended indistinguishable into tones she knew, and in her dreams she communed with Jack.

All night long the storm bellowed and flickered about the town, but about four in the morning the guns of heaven were silent, and the rain began to fall less heavily, and when Jeannie woke, soon after six, the room was filled with the transparent aqueous light of a clear dawn. A smell of unutterable cleanliness came in through the open window, and from her bed she saw the last star fade in the dove-coloured sky. Short as had been her sleep, she felt no inclination to lie in bed, and got up and went to the bath-room. A rain-gauge was on the leads outside, and stepping out through the open window she examined it and saw that two inches of rain had fallen in the night. The flowers in the garden-beds, as she had expected, were beaten down and robbed of their petals, and the smaller gravel from the paths had been swept on to the grass in a spreading delta. The stalwart-leaved mulberry had not suffered, and the outline of leaves was cut out with lavishness and clearness against the tenderness of the sky. Above no traces of the overpast tempest lingered: the pale blue of the zenith melted with imperceptible gradation into the dove colour of the horizons on the west and north, in the south-west the pink of the dawn was already growing gilded before the sun imminent to rise. Already, so it seemed to Jeannie, a flush of green had spread over the grass, and the glistening house-roofs, so long dust-ridden, looked clean again. Above all, the intolerable oppression of the air was no more than a sick dream of night, and to be abroad in this exquisite dawn was like coming out of an ill-ventilated tunnel into the coolness of Alpine pastures. Even as she looked a beam of the risen day shot its level arrow and struck the elm-trees in the close, and with the aptest punctuality a thrush scudded out of the bushes below her and poured out a throatful of repeated song. And on the moment a verse from the song of songs chimed in her head. “The rain is over and past, the flowers appear on the earth, the time of the singing birds has come.”

She stood looking out over the fair rejuvenated earth, smiling. At last she turned.

“Indeed it has come,” she said.