clad and the rain wetting her face. Under the tin roof, the air was filled
with the rattling reverberation of the rain. The woman lifted her head
and, with the rain beating down upon her, began singing, her fine
contralto voice rising above the rattle of the rain on the roof and going
on uninterrupted by the crash of the thunder. She sang of a lover riding
through the storm to his mistress. One refrain persisted in the song--

"He rode and he thought of her red, red lips,"

sang the woman, putting her hand upon the railing of the little porch and
leaning forward into the storm.

Sam was amazed. The woman standing before him was Mary Underwood, who had
been his friend when he was a boy in school and toward whom his mind had
turned after the tragedy in the kitchen. The figure of the woman standing
singing before him became a part of his thoughts of his mother singing on
the stormy night in the house and his mind wandered on, seeing pictures as
he used to see them when a boy walking under the stars and listening to
the talk of John Telfer. He saw a broad-shouldered man shouting defiance
to the storm as he rode down a mountain path.

"And he laughed at the rain on his wet, wet cloak," went on the voice of
the singer.

Mary Underwood's singing there in the rain made her seem near and likeable
as she had seemed to him when he was a barefoot boy.

"John Telfer was wrong about her," he thought.

She turned and faced him. Tiny streams of water ran from her hair down