In that brief interval of time the storm clouds had moved on, covering the sun so completely that it was dark as an eclipse.

Stubbornly, as though insisting on its rights, the wind stopped Levin, and tearing the leaves and flowers off the lime trees and stripping the white birch branches into strange unseemly nakedness, it twisted everything on one side--acacias, flowers, burdocks, long grass, and tall tree-tops.

The peasant girls working in the garden ran shrieking into shelter in the servants' quarters.

The streaming rain had already flung its white veil over all the distant forest and half the fields close by, and was rapidly swooping down upon the copse.

The wet of the rain spurting up in tiny drops could be smelt in the air.