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But hark! a new sound, mingling its clatter with all the others.
It is the rain. Quick, maddening, drenching, it comes; enveloping
them in wet in a moment. Can they hold their faces up against it?
And the wind! Surely it must toss that aerial messenger before
it and fling it back to earth, a broken and despised toy.
"Orlando?" went up in a shriek. "Orlando?" Oh, for a ray of light
in those far-off heavens For a lull in the tremendous sounds
shivering the heavens and shaking the earth! But the tempest rages
on, and they can only wait, five minutes, ten minutes, looking,
hoping, fearing, without thought of self and almost without thought
of each other, till suddenly as it had come, the rain ceases and
the wind, with one final wail of rage and defeat, rushes away into
the west, leaving behind it a sudden silence which, to their
terrified hearts, seems almost more dreadful to bear than the
accumulated noises of the moment just gone.
Orlando was in that shout of natural forces, but he is not in this
stillness. They look aloft, but the heavens are void. Emptiness
is where life was. Oswald begins to sway, and Doris, remembering
him now and him only, has thrown her strong young arm about him,
when - What is this sound they hear high up, high up, in the rapidly
clearing vault of the heavens! A throb - a steady pant,- drawing
near and yet nearer,- entering the circlet of great branches over
their heads - descending, slowly descending,- till they catch
another glimpse of those hazy outlines which had no sooner taken
shape than the car disappeared from their sight within the
elliptical wall open to receive it.
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