XI.
On the first Sunday in October, Dorinda came out on the porch, with old Rambler at her side, and looked over the road and the pasture to the frowning sky. The range of clouds, which had huddled all the afternoon above the western horizon, was growing darker, and there was a slow pulsation, like the quiver of invisible wings, in the air. While she stood there, she wondered if the storm would overtake her before she reached Whistling Spring.
"I think I'll risk it," she decided at last. "It's looked this way for hours, and it won't hurt me to get wet."
For days she had felt disturbed, and she told herself that her anxiety had sprung from a definite cause, or, if not from a definite cause,—well, at least from a plausible reason. Jason had been away for two weeks, and she had had only on
