And indeed black, threatening clouds were coming up rapidly.
"I'd ask you to come and see us," she added as they fled from the square, "only the place is so horrid. You see, Alexander not only works there, but we live there, too," she continued, while they stood waiting for a car with the wind whipping their dresses about them. "Alexander has a workshop, that's all he cares for, and I have a room about three feet square; and then he has a horrid deaf and dumb creature who helps him. Oh, if I'd known he was going to have _him_ live with us!" and her voice broke. "You've been so good to let me go on in this way," she cried, as the car stopped. "I'll tell my husband I met you. What name shall I say?"
But Rachel did not answer. She merely nodded as the other, in a tremour of fright, stepped on the car.
"You'll get caught in the rain!" Annie called after her.
The rain descended at first thin and fine as if poured through a sieve; then it increased in volume till the gutters ran yellow torrents, till the sordid brick buildings looked like drenched, warty frogs of a giant growth, till the slender trees in the squares fairly bent to the ground. But Rachel was caught in the vortex of a storm even wilder.
It was two hours later when she slowly climbed the steps of the tenement house. Emily Short's voice reached her from an upper landing:
"There, don't you go looking him up again, will you, Betty? There ain't a man in the world worth running after."
Rachel halted and a fierce denunciatory light flamed in her eyes. Then she pulled herself together.
When she opened the door of the outer room Simon Hart rose to greet her. He felt that he had taken her by surprise and, in embarrassment, smoothed his hair.
"It's going to clear," he said and glanced toward the window which let into the tiny room the slowly increasing light.
Rachel swept a look in the same direction. "Yes," she repeated, "it's--clearing."
In the sky, visible beyond the clutter of wet roofs, appeared a strange arrangement of gold bars, and above the bars huddled the thunder clouds like a herd of newly-tamed animals.
SHOWING THAT SACRIFICES ARE NOT ALWAYS APPRECIATED
To cast a glance backward,--it was with a mixture of surprise, chagrin and growing indignation, that Emil St. Ives took his way from the Maine coast to tumultuous, brain-inspiring New York. In the hotel at Old Harbour he lingered over his packing, confident until the last moment, that some word would arrive from Rachel. She surely would not allow him to go without seeking to effect a reconciliation. No word came and, once seated in the train, he stared out at the landscape with sullen fierceness. But there, in scraggy rocks, stumps of trees, water, meadows, salt marshes, wind with a tang in it, gold beams poured from rifted clouds, mist, storm, rolling fog--there was Rachel, the girl herself. She was dancing, scudding on ahead of the train, wrapped in a veil. Now he saw the gleam of her eyes; now her serious mouth! now the curve of a wrist; now a fleeing ankle! Remaining behind, she yet went with him! Deuce take it, he felt her breath on his face!