I laid a hand on her wet blankets.  “Has the rain soaked through?”

But she did not listen.  The exultation in her look I have seen sometimes in the face of a young priest; I have also seen it in a savage dancer.  It is all one.  It is the leaping response of the soul to the call of a great freedom.  Storm was summoning storm.  I found the woman’s hand, and lay with it in mine.

She remembered me again after a time.  “Does it call to you?” she cried.

I could feel the blood racing in her palm.  “As it does to you,” I answered, and I lay still, and let the storm riot in me, and around me, with her hand held close.

We could not speak for some time.  The thunder was constant, and the play of the lightning was like the dazzle of a fencer’s sword.  Mingled with the thunder came the slap of frothing water and the whine of bending trees.  The wind was ice to the cheeks.

At the first lull the woman turned to me.  “If you had followed my wishes we should have been drowned.”

I nodded.  I had no wish to speak.  The storm in me was not lessening.  I kept the woman’s hand and was swept on by the tempest.

And the woman, too, lay silent.  I saw her look at me once, and look away.  And then, because I could think more coherently, it came to me that she had changed.  The change had come since she had read Cadillac’s letter.  She had said nothing, but she was different.  What did it mean?  Was she natural at last because she thought succor was near?  I was not ready to know.  The moments that I had now were mine.  Ten minutes later they might, if she decreed, belong to Benjamin Starling.

The storm passed as swiftly as the shifting of a tableau.  The rain stopped, not lingeringly, but as if a key had been turned, and cracks came in the clouds like clefts in black ice and showed the blue beyond.  In five minutes the sun was shining.  We all crept out from under trees and canoes, and shook ourselves like drenched fowls.

It was magic the way the world changed.  The wind died, and the sun shone low and yellow, and a robin began to sing.  The water was still white and fretting, and the sand was strewn with torn leaves, but otherwise there was peace.  I told Pierre to take one of the men and find dry fuel for a fire, and Labarthe to take the other and attend to gumming the canoes.  Then I went to the woman, who had slipped dry and red-cheeked from her wrappings, and was walking in the sun.

“Well, Madame Montlivet,” I said, with a bow, “what shall we do about Monsieur Cadillac’s letter?”

There was laughter in my voice, and it confused her.  “What shall we do?” she echoed doubtfully.  “Did you mean to say ’we’?”

I bowed again. “‘We’ assuredly.  It must be a joint decision.  Come, it is for you to declare your mind.  Do we seek Lord Starling, do we hide from him, or do we stand still and let Fate throw the dice for us?  What do you wish, madame?”