Felix clasped the trembling girl in his arms like a lover.

The two Shadows looked on and shook with silent terror.

If the King of the Rain thus embraced the Queen of the Clouds before their very eyes, amid so awful a storm, what unspeakable effects might not follow at once from it! But they had too much respect for those supernatural creatures to attempt to interfere with their action at such a moment.

They accepted their masters almost as passively as they accepted the wind and the thunder, which they believed to arise from them.
Felix laid his poor Muriel tenderly down on the mud floor again.

"I _must_ go out, my child," he said.