dear curve of her chin, the
throat there slim against the light. Hard work had driven her
image a little from his mind lately; it returned now to revenge
his self-absorption--returned with a song.

Dickie got up and wandered about the room. He tried to hum the air, but
his throat contracted. He tried to whistle, but his lips turned stiff. He
bent over his book--no use, she still sang. All night he was tormented by
that chanting, hurting song. He sobbed with the hurt of it. He tossed
about on his bed. He could not but remember how little she had loved him.
All at once there came to him a mysterious and beautiful release. It
seemed that the cool spirit, detached, winged, drew him to itself or
became itself entirely possessed of him. He was taken out of his pain
and yet he understood it. And he began suddenly, easily, to put it into
words. The misery was ecstasy, the hurt was inspiration, the song sang
sweetly as though it had been sung to soothe and not to make him suffer.

"Oh, little song you sang to me"--

Ah, yes, at heart she had been singing to him--

"A hundred, hundred days ago,
Oh, little song, whose melody
Walks in my heart and stumbles so;
I cannot bear the level nights,
And all the days are over-long,
And all the hours from dark to dark
Turn to a little song ..."

Dickie, not knowing how he got there, was at his table again. He was
writing. He was happy beyond any conception he had ever had of happiness.
That there was agony in his happiness only intensified it. The leader of
the wolf-pack, beast with a god's face, the noblest of man's desires,
that passionate and humble craving for beauty, had him by the throat.

So it was that Dickie wrote his first poem.

CHAPTER X

WINTER

Winter snapped at Hidden Creek as a wolf snaps, but held its grip as a
bulldog holds his. There came a few November days when all the air and
sky and tree-tops were filled with summer again, but the snow that had
poured itself down so steadily in that October storm did not give way. It
sank a trifle at noon and covered itself at night with a glare of ice. It
was impossible to go anywhere except on snow-shoes. Sheila quickly
learned the trick and plodded with bent knees, limber ankles, and
wide-apart feet through the winter miracle of the woods. It was another
revelation of pure beauty, but her heart was too sore to hold the
splendor as it had held the gentler beauty of summer and autumn. Besides,
little by lit