heat was more bearable.  He wanted to get away from his house, which was permeated and soaked in association with the other two actors, who in company with himself, had surely some tragedy for which the curtain was already rung up.  Some dreadful scene was already prepared for them; the setting and stage were ready, the prompter, and who was he? was in the box ready to tell them the next line if any of them faltered.  The prompter, surely he was destiny, fate, the irresistible course of events, with which no man can struggle, any more than the actor can struggle with or alter the lines that are set down for him.  He may mumble them, he may act dispiritedly and tamely, but he has undertaken a certain part; he has to go through with it.

Though it was a populous hour of the day, there were but few people abroad when Mr. Taynton came out to the sea front; a few cabs stood by the railings that bounded the broad asphalt path which faced the sea, but the drivers of these, despairing of fares, were for the most part dozing on the boxes, or with a more set purpose were frankly slumbering in the interior.  The dismal little wooden shelters that punctuated the parade were deserted, the pier stretched an untenanted length of boards over the still, lead-coloured sea, and it seemed as if nature herself was waiting for some elemental catastrophe.

And though the afternoon was of such hideous and sultry heat, Mr. Taynton, though he walked somewhat more briskly than his wont, was conscious of no genial heat that produced perspiration, and the natural reaction and cooling of the skin.  Some internal excitement and fever of the brain cut off all external things; the loneliness, the want of correspondence that fever brings between external and internal conditions, was on him.  At one moment, in spite of the heat, he shivered, at another he felt that an apoplexy must strike him.

For some half hour he walked to and fro along the sea-wall, between the blackness of the sky and the lead-coloured water, and then his thoughts turned to the downs above this stricken place, where, even in the sultriest days some breath of wind was always moving.  Just opposite him, on the other side of the road, was the street that led steeply upward to the station.  He went up it.

* * * * *

It was about half-past seven o’clock that evening that the storm burst.  A few huge drops of rain fell on the hot pavements, then the rain ceased again, and the big splashes dried, as if the stones had been blotting paper that sucked the moisture in.  Then without other warning a streamer of fire split the steeple of St. Agnes’s Church, just opposite Mr. Taynton’s house, and the crash of thunder answered it more quickly than his servant had run to open the door to Morris’s furious ringing of the bell.  At that the sluices of heaven were opened, and heaven’s artillery thundered its salvoes to the flare of the reckless storm.  In the next half-hour a dozen houses in Brighton were struck, while the choked gutters overflowing on to the streets made ravines and waterways down the roadways.  Then the thunder and lightning ceased, but the rain still poured down relentlessly and windlessly, a flood of perpendicular water.