her hand, had come to
something very like content.

The roar of Hidden Creek swelled and swelled. After the snow had shrunk
into patches here and there under the pines and against hilly slopes,
there was still the melting of the mountain glaciers.

"Nobody can possibly cross!" Sheila exulted. "A man would have to risk
his life." And it was in one of those very moments of her savage
self-congratulation when there came the sound of nearing hoofs.

She was sitting on her threshold, watching the slow darkness, a
sifting-down of ashes through the still air. It was so very still that
the little new moon hung there above the firs like faint music. Silver
and gray, and silver and green, and violet--Sheila named the delicacies
of dappled light. The stars had begun to shake little shivers of radiance
through the firs. They were softer than the winter stars--their keenness
melted by the warm blue of the air. Sheila sat and held her knees and
smiled. The distant, increasing tumult of the river, so part of the
silence that it seemed no sound at all, lulled her--Then--above it--the
beat of horse's hoofs.

At first she just sat empty of sensation except for the shock of those
faint thuds of sound. Then her heart began to beat to bursting; with
dread, with a suffocation of suspense. She got up, quiet as a thief. The
horse stopped. There came a step, rapid and eager. She fled like a
furtive shadow into the house, fell on her knees there by the hearth, and
hid her face against the big hide-covered chair. Her eyes were full of
cold tears. Her finger-tips were ice. She was shaking--shuddering,
rather--from head to foot. The steps had come close, had struck the
threshold. There they stopped. After a pause, which her pulses filled
with shaken rhythm, her name was spoken--So long it had been since she
had heard it that it fell on her ear like a foreign speech.

"Sheila! Sheila!"

She lifted her head sharply. It was not Hilliard's voice.

"Sheila--" There was such an agony of fear in the softly spoken
syllables, there was such a weight of dread on the breath of the speaker,
that, for very pity, Sheila forgot herself. She got up from the floor and
moved dazedly to meet the figure on the threshold. It was dimly outlined
against the violet evening light. Sheila came up quite close and put her
hands on the tense, hanging arms. They caught her. Then she sobbed and
laughed aloud, calling out in her astonishment again and again, softly,
incre