Page:Rilla of Ingleside (1921).djvu/235



NE cold grey morning in February, Gertrude Oliver wakened with a shiver, slipped into Rilla’s room, and crept in beside her.

“Rilla—I’m frightened—frightened as a baby—I’ve had another of my strange dreams. Something terrible is before us—I know.”

“What was it?” asked Rilla.

“I was standing again on the veranda steps—just as I stood in that dream on the night before the light-house dance, and in the sky a huge black, menacing thunder cloud rolled up from the east. I could see its shadow racing before it and when it enveloped me I shivered with icy cold. Then the storm broke—and it was a dreadful storm—blinding flash after flash and deafening peal after peal, driving torrents of rain. I turned in panic and tried to run for shelter, and as I did so a man—a soldier in the uniform of a French army officer—dashed up the steps and stood beside me on the threshold of the door. His clothes were soaked with blood from a wound in his breast, he seemed spent and exhausted; but his white face was set and his eyes blazed in his hollow face. ‘They shall not pass,’ he said, in low, passionate tones which I heard distinctly amid all the turmoil of the storm. Then I awakened. Rilla, I’m frightened—the spring will not bring the Big Push we've all been hoping for—instead it is going to bring some dreadful blow to