Bonny Jean, and A Severe Threat — page 161: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

154 A SEVERE THREAT. back to the girl’s memory. She sat up and put her hand to her brow. The lightning shock, which had deprived her of sensi- bility for a longer time than she could realize, had done its worst for Lola Gordon ; for, as she staggered slowly to her feet, oppressed by a strange foreboding of more sorrow yet in store for her, her eyes caught a glow of light against the inky black- ness of the sky, and, with a low moan of horror, she saw that the lightning which had deprived her of consciousness had stricken the little cottage, and it was a mass of seething flame, burned nearly to the ground. Dragging herself forward, she paused under the dripping branches of a tree, and watched the last flames flicker and die out until there was nothing left of the pretty cot—and her mother’s lifeless body—save a heap of charred fragments, upon which the slow rain fell gently. ‘‘God help me!” panted the girl, as she turned and dashed away through the blackness of the midnight. On, on she fled, poor, homeless creature, not knowing whither she went. The darkness folded her like a mantle. She could not see the path, and a fine drizzly rain beat upon her un- ‘covered head. Still she dashed on. All at once her foot struck something in the path, and with a wild cry. of pain she sank down upon the ground in the night and gloom, and the dark- ness covered her. CHAPTER IX, LA BOHEMIENNE, Loud, and clear, and sweet, a voice fell upon the air—a woman's voice, wild and untrained, but full of wondrous possi- bilities—and the singer, a girl of eighteen or twenty, tripped on- ward over the wet footpath which led to Waltham the morning succeeding the occurrences justrelated. She was not beautiful, only simply pretty and audacious, in her short dress of dark- (ee) Comicbooks 3