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and forth. He had been deeply stirred without really knowing why—unless it was the ghost of Will, evoked in his conversation with Martin, that had disturbed him.
    The afternoon had been sunlit, with warm, still air. Jef sneezed suddenly, rubbed his nose in some perplexity and sneezed again. He looked around himself for a cause, but could see nothing different except a line of dark clouds, led by an anvil shape of strong thunderheads building up on the horizon to the west.
    As he watched, however, the dark cloud-line spread rapidly forward. Evidently, the clouds were being driven almost directly in this direction. He stood watching them, his pacing forgotten. A gust of much cooler air, running before the shade that the cloud-bank was now spreading over the countryside to the west, seemed to clear his mind of the roiling emotions that had been troubling it. The clouds boiled on, their leading edge forming changing shapes that his imagination could translate into towers and mountain valleys, horse heads and crocodiles. The cloud edge spread to cover the sun and he saw its shadow race suddenly across the lawn of Armage's house and envelop him in a gentle twilight.
    A melancholy seemed to ride the pinions of the gathering squall. A not unpleasant melancholy. Jef felt himself caught up in the interaction of the land and the weather, drawn into an action nostalgic and sad but, in its own way, beautiful. The clouds had covered all the sky now, as he watched; and the first gust of rain flew about him. But he did not retreat from it into the house, or back under the meager shelter of the narrow porch roof. Instead, he stood there, feeling a pleasure in the wind, and the touch of the raindrops, even as the wind strengthened.
    It came harder out of the west. The rain was a downpour suddenly; and in an instant his shirt was soaked to him like another skin. Thunder cracked in the clouds, and all at once the rain was not rain, but hail, pearled spheres descending, bouncing on the lawn and lying glinting in the dimmed light.
    Now he did move back, reluctantly, under the porch roof out of the direct fall of the hail. The wind, sounding about the house, the loud pattering of the hail on the steps and the porch floor, as well as on the roof overhead, blended so that he could almost imagine it making a music—music that seemed to sing of hope and tragedy combined, of beauty and sorrow.
    There was a struggle in the song of the storm sounds, but it was a good struggle, a natural struggle, like the struggle of a child and its mother in the birth process. The gusts of wind were strong now and the hail was large. It hammered the ground. The wind tore at the false pillars of the house and the clouds streamed by overhead with rollings of thunder. Gradually, as the minutes went by and he watched, the volume of the storm song diminished, the hail began to give way to simple rain, heavily falling. The overcast lightened and the wind dropped, dropped, until it was hardly noticeable at all; and the main theme of the song was only in the steady drumming of rain on the porch roof.
    The rain slowed. The overcast lightened even more... and far on the western horizon he began to see a thinning and breaking of the clouds, a clearing with blue sky beginning to show through. The clear sky grew and approached. The rain dwindled and ended, and fifteen minutes later the fleeing overcast uncovered the sun once more, so that golden light shone down all around on lawn and trees, now shining with wetness and still pearled with occasional unmelted hailstones, scattered here and there.
    Jef took a deep breath. For a moment he had been one with the storm, had been a part of its forces, a part of this planet. He felt cleansed and freshly at peace with himself and the situation that held him. He turned and went back upstairs to his room.

Chapter Four
    "I'll be right downstairs," Jef said to Mikey a little later. "I shouldn't be gone more than three hours at the most."
    He