The thunder crashed again.

But he retreated no farther.

His eyes were fixed on Nepeese.
She stood straight and slim in that gathering gloom riven by the lightning, her beautiful head thrown back, her lips parted, and her eyes glowing with an almost eager anticipation--a sculptured goddess welcoming with bated breath the onrushing forces of the heavens.
Perhaps it was because she was born during a night of storm.

Many times Pierrot and the dead princess mother had told her that--how on the night she had come into the world the crash of thunder and the flare of lightning had made the hours an inferno, how the streams had burst over their banks and the stems of ten thousand forest trees had snapped in its fury--and the beat of the deluge on their cabin roof had drowned the sound of her mother's pain, and of her own first babyish cries.
On that night, it may be, the Spirit of Storm was born in Nepeese.

She loved to face it, as she was facing it now.