She was coming toward
him. He bent his head and lowered his umbrella and lost
sight of her as they approached, she with the storm behind
her, driven with hardly more resistance than the last
year's blackened leaves that blew with her, he assailed
by it and making the best way he could. Certainly the
wind was taking her part and his, when in another moment
her skirt whipped against him and he saw her face glimmer
out. A mere wreck of lines and shadows it seemed in the
livid light, with suddenly perceiving eyes and lips that
cried his name. She had on a hat and a cloak, but carried
no umbrella, and her hands were bare and wet. Pitifully
the storm blew her into his arms, a tossed and straying
thing that could not speak for sobs; pitifully and with
a rough incoherent sound he gathered and held her in that
refuge. A rising fear and a great solicitude laid a finger
upon his craving embrace of her; he had a sense of
something strangely different in her, of the unknown
irremediable. Yet she was there, in his arms, as she had
never been before; her plight but made her in a manner
sweeter; the storm that brought her barricaded them in
the empty spaces of the street with a divinely entreating
solitude. He had been prepared to meet her in the lighted
decorum of her father's house and he knew what he should
say.
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