The rain drove slanting over flower-bed and lawn, and pattered heavily against the glass; and the two Armadales stood by the window, as the two Shadows had stood in the Second Vision of the Dream, with the wreck of the image between them.
Allan stooped over the fragments of the little figure, and lifted them one by one from the floor.
"Leave me," he said, without looking up, "or we shall both repent it."
Without a word, Midwinter moved back slowly. He stood for the second time with his hand on the door, and looked his last at the room. The horror of the night on the Wreck had got him once more, and the flame of his passion was quenched in an instant.
"The Dream!" he whispered, under his breath. "The Dream again!"
The door was tried from the outside, and a servant appeared with a trivial message about the breakfast.
Midwinter looked at the man with a blank, dreadful helplessness in his face. "Show me the way out," he said. "The place is dark, and the room turns round with me."
The servant took him by the arm, and silently led him out.
As the door closed on them, Allan picked up the last fragment of the broken figure. He sat down alone at the table, and hid his face in his hands. The self-control which he had bravely preserved under exasperation renewed again and again now failed him at last in the friendless solitude of his room, and, in the first bitterness of feeling that Midwinter had turned against him like the rest, he burst into tears.
The moments followed each other, the slow time wore on. Little by little the signs of a new elemental disturbance began to show themselves in the summer storm. The shadow of a swiftly deepening darkness swept over the sky. The pattering of the rain lessened with the lessening wind. There was a momentary hush of stillness. Then on a sudden the rain poured down again like a cataract, and the low roll of thunder came up solemnly on the dying air.