ands. Only three days for this
decision and, without a decision, that awful, helpless wandering, those
dangers, those rash confidences of hers. "O God, where are you? Why don't
you help me now?" That was Sheila's prayer. It gave her little comfort,
but she did fall asleep from the mental exhaustion to which it brought at
least the relief of expression.

When she woke, she found the world a horrible confusion of storm. It
could hardly be called morning--a heavy, flying darkness of drift, a wind
filled with icy edges that stung the face and cut the eyes, a wind with
the voice of a driven saw. The little cabin was caught in the whirling
heart of a snow spout twenty feet high. The firs bent and groaned. There
is a storm-fear, one of the inherited instinctive fears. Sheila's little
face looked out of the whipped windows with a pinched and shrinking
stare. She went from window to hearth, looking and listening, all day. A
drift was blown in under the door and hardly melted for all the blazing
fire. That night she couldn't go to bed. She wrapped herself in blankets
and curled herself up in the chair, nodding and starting in the circle of
the firelight.

For three terrible days the world was lost in snow. Before the end of
that time Sheila was talking to herself and glad of the sound of her own
hurried little voice. Then, like God, came a beautiful stillness and the
sun. She opened the door on the fourth morning and saw, above the fresh,
soft, ascending dazzle of the drift, a sky that laughed in azure, the
green, snow-laden firs, a white and purple peak. She spread out her hands
to feel the sun and found it warm. She held it like a friendly hand. She
forced herself that day to shovel, to sweep, even to eat. Perhaps Cosme
would be back before night. He and the parson would have waited for the
storm to be over before they made their start. She believed in her own
excuses for five uneasy days, and then she believed in the worst of all
her fears. She had a hundred to choose from--Cosme's desertion, Cosme's
death.... One day she spent walking to and fro with her nails driven into
her palms.

* * * * *

Late that night the white world dipped into the still influence of a full
white moon. Before Hilliard's cabin the great firs caught the light with
a deepening flush of green, their shadows fell in even lavender tracery
delicate and soft across the snow, across the drifted roof. The smoke
from the half