"It is a dance, 'Gueda. Do you see them, those fairies? Watch that one advancing there, to the southward. She approaches the lady from the east. See them skip and whirl and pass as if in a quadrille. It is a pretty sight. You will see that once in a lifetime--not oftener. They call it the _trompa marina_ at sea."
Agueda raised her eyes and looked smiling towards the spot to which he nodded. There white and twisting spirals danced and swayed against that lurid background, and above the deep bay, which was hidden by the hills. They advanced, they retreated, they dipped like sprites from palm tuft to palm tuft. Sometimes they skipped gaily in couples, again one was left to follow three or four that had their heads close together, like schoolchildren telling secrets. It was all so human and everyday-like, that Agueda laughed gaily and gazed fascinated at the antics of these children of the storm. The long, ragged-edged split in the angry clouds disclosed a blood-red glow behind, which sent its glare down through the valley and across the woods, where it flecked the tree trunks. From Beltran's vantage point the palm shafts stood black as night against the glare. When he turned and looked behind him, unwilling to lose a single bit of this latest painting from the brush of nature, he found that she had dashed every tree trunk with one gorgeous splash of ruddy gold.
Agueda lifted her basket and carried it to the chimenea unaided. Beltran was so absorbed in the grand sight that he had forgotten to be kind. There was usually no thought of gallantry in what he did for the girl, but even the natural kindliness of his manner was in abeyance. Agueda set the basket behind the great stone wall. She remembered what he had said the last time they had sought shelter from the water. "It is ridiculous, that great chimney," he had said: "but even the absurd things of life have their uses." She remembered how she had crouched in her mother's arms the whole long day, but beyond a few drops there had been no cloud-burst, no flood that came higher than the top step of the veranda. They had descended at night dry and unharmed.
"It may be like the last one," she ventured to say. But her sentence was drowned. There came a rustling and swaying sound from afar, growing louder as it approached. Beltran noted the ruthless path which it indicated, and then, "there came a rushing, mighty wind from Heaven." It fell upon the tall lilies as if they were grass, bent them to the earth, and laid them prostrate. Some of them, denizens of the soil more tenacious of their hold than others, clung to Mother Earth with the grip of the inheritor of primogeniture. But the struggle was brief.