August felt the everlastingness of love; as many another man in a supreme crisis has felt it.
But the swift cloud had already covered half the sky, and the bursts of thunder followed one another now in quicker succession.

And as suddenly as the thunder had come, came the wind.

A solitary old sycamore, leaning over the water on the Kentucky shore, a mile away, was first to fall.

In the lurid darkness, August and Julia saw it meet its fate.

Then the rail fences on the nearer bank were scattered like kindling-wood, and some of the sturdy old apple-trees of the orchard in the river-bottom were uprooted, while others were stripped of their boughs.