From the ocean rose the voice of a blast seemingly worse than any that had gone before. It was the apex of the storm. It drowned anything further Tobias might have said.

The hurricane from the sea took the light tower in its arms and shook it. The roar of it made the woman's face blanch.

As the sound poured away into the distance the two in the kitchen heard a crash of gla.s.s-then a scream. Tobias dashed for the stairway door.

"The lamp!" he shouted.

"That ain't no lamp, Tobias," declared his sister.

When he opened the door a gale rushed in and sucked the flame out of the top of the lamp chimney with a "plop!" The stairway seemed filled with a whirling cyclone of wintry air.

Tobias heard the clatter of Ralph Endicott's boots on the iron treads coming down from above. A door was banging madly on the second floor.

Lorna screamed again.

"The window of the best room's burst in, Tobias," shouted Miss Heppy.

"That poor child!"

The lightkeeper had seized his lantern, and now he started up the stairway. But youth was quicker than vigorous old age. Ralph plunged into the bedchamber, the door of which had been burst open by the blast from the wrecked window.

The cowering figure of the girl at the foot of the bed, wrapped in Miss Heppy's voluminous nightgown, was visible in the whirlwind of snow. She sprang toward Ralph with a cry of relief, and the young man gathered her into his arms as though she were a child.

"Oh, Ralph!"

"All right, Lorna! You're safe enough. Don't be frightened," soothed Endicott.

For a long moment he sheltered her thus, bulwarking his own body between her and the blast from the window. She cowered in his arms. Then:

"For love's sake!" gasped Miss Heppy at the head of the stairs.

The lantern in her brother's hand broadly illumined the two young people. Tobias himself was enormously amused.

"Don't look as though you hated each other none to speak of," was his tactless comment.

"Tobias!" shrieked Miss Heppy.

Lorna struggled out of Ralph's arms in a flame of rage.

"How dare you, Ralph Endicott?" she cried. "I thought you were at least a gentleman. You go right away from here-now-this minute! I'll never speak to you again!"

"Why, I-I--"

Ralph was too startled for the moment to be angry. The girl ran in her bare feet to the comfort of Miss Heppy's ample person.

"Take me somewhere! Take me to your room, Miss Heppy. I never want to see him again. How dared he?"

"Oh, sugar!" murmured the perfectly amazed lightkeeper.

But the fires of rage began to glow within Ralph Endicott's bosom now, blown by the blast of Lorna's ingrat.i.tude. His face blazed.

"What do you mean?" he demanded. "I did not come here because I wanted to. You yelled loud enough for help. I-I--"

"That will do!" exclaimed Lorna, her head up, as regal as any angry little queen could be. "If you were a gentleman by nature you would have refused to stay here in the first place, when you knew the light was my only shelter."

"Well, of all the--"

"You can go on to Clinkerport. Telephone from the hotel to Aunt Ida and tell her where I am and whose care I am in. If the story that you and I remained here all night together is circulated about Harbor Bar, I'll never forgive you, Ralph Endicott!"

"Great Scott!" shouted the young man, coming out into the hall and closing the door of the bedroom. "You don't suppose for a moment _I_ want such a story circulated among our friends, do you? No fear!"

He started down the stairs, pulling his cap over his ears and b.u.t.toning his automobile coat up to his throat.

"For love's sake!" again gasped the troubled spinster, who still held the girl in her arms.

"Hold on! Hold on!" exclaimed Tobias. "'Tain't fit for to turn a dog out into this storm."

"I don't care!" cried the hysterical girl wildly. "He never should have let the car stall in that snowdrift. He should have gone on to Clinkerport alone instead of making a nuisance of himself around here."

The lower door banged as punctuation to her speech.

Tobias started to descend the stair. His sister motioned him commandingly toward the door of the best room.

"You find some way to stopper that window, Tobias," she said, "and then go back to your lamp. You can't do no good interfering in this."

She led the sobbing girl into her own room and closed the door. The lightkeeper shook his head.

"I give it as my opinion," he muttered, "that women folks is as hard to understand as the Chinee language. And they begin their finicking mighty airly."

Lorna sobbed herself into quietness in Miss Heppy's feather bed, cuddled into the good spinster's embrace. The latter did not speak one word of criticism. But as her pa.s.sion ebbed, Lorna's conscience p.r.i.c.ked her sorely. She only appeared to fall asleep. In truth she remained very wide awake listening to the bellowing of the gale.

Suppose something should happen to Ralph out in the storm? It was hours, it seemed to her, before the wind calmed at all. She visualized her friend staggering along the road toward Clinkerport, back of the Clay Head cottages that were all empty at this time of year. Suppose he was overcome by the storm, and fell there, and was drifted over by the snow?

She lay and trembled at these thoughts; but she would not have admitted for the world that she cared!

After all, Ralph had been her playmate for years. Why, she could not remember when Ralph was not hanging upon the outskirts of the Nicholet family. He was as omnipresent, as she had told him, as Aunt Ida. And Miss Ida Nicholet had ever been Lorna's guardian.

The girl was the youngest of a goodly number of brothers and sisters; but her mother, Mr. Nicholet's second wife, had died at Lorna's birth.

Miss Ida had come into the big house at Harbor Bar at that time and a.s.sumed entire control-at least of Lorna.

The other girls and boys had grown up and flown the nest. Mr. Nicholet was a busy man of studious habits who, if the housemaid had come into his library, kissed him on his bald crown, and asked him for twenty dollars, would have produced the money without question, said, "Yes, my child," and considered that he had done his duty by his youngest daughter.

Lorna had often pa.s.sed him on the street and he had not known her.

But Mr. Nicholet subscribed to everything Miss Ida, his energetic sister, said. If she declared it was the right thing for Lorna to marry Ralph Endicott-that ended the matter as far as Mr. Nicholet was concerned. Lorna knew it to be quite useless to appeal to him.

By and by it began to rain-torrentially. This, following the snow which had drifted so heavily during the evening, somewhat relieved Lorna's anxiety. The rain would flood the roads and make them impa.s.sable, even if Ralph could repair his car; but no wanderer on foot would be drifted over by rain.

She heard Tobias go down and up the spiral staircase more than once. He even went out of the lighthouse on one occasion. That was soon after Ralph had gone and while the storm was still high. But the lightkeeper had quickly returned.