f the snow with the sun on it is like white star-dust
overlaid with gold. The radiance would have been unbearable had not the
bare, black trees veiled the sky with their network of branches and
twigs and the pines softened the snow with their shadows.

Pearl had rapidly acquired proficiency in her new accomplishment, and
she and Seagreave had covered several miles when, on their return, they
paused to rest a bit in the little bower of stunted pines. Here
Seagreave cut some branches from the trees for them to sit on and,
gathering some dry, fallen boughs and cones, built a fire.

They enjoyed this a few moments in silence and then Pearl spoke. "Why,"
she asked with her usual directness, "why did you get up and walk up and
down the room last night when Hughie was playing? What was it in his
music that made you forget all of us and even, as you said, forget that
you were not in your own cabin?"

"That was stupid of me and rude, too," he said compunctiously.
"Something that he was playing called up so vivid a memory that I forgot
everything."

There was a quick gleam in her eyes; she was resentful of memories that
could make him forget her very presence, hers. "What was it you were
thinking of?" she asked. Her voice was low.

He looked out over the snow before he answered. "A girl," he said, and
cast another handful of pine cones upon the fire.

She did not speak nor move, and yet her whole being was instinct with a
sudden tense attention. "Yes, a girl," she said insistently. "What was
she like?" the words leaped from her, voicing themselves almost without
her volition.

He sighed and appeared to speak with some effort. "It was long ago," he
said. "She was like violets or white English roses."

"And did you love her?" she asked, that soft tenseness still in her
voice, "and did she love you?"

"I suppose every man has his ideal of woman, perhaps unconsciously to
himself, and she was mine."

He sighed again and she glanced quickly at him from the corners of her
eyes with a half scornful smile upon her lips. She knew that she did not
suggest violets, shy and fragrant and hidden under their own green
leaves; neither was there anything in the mountains to suggest the
gardens in which roses grew. But he had left the violets and English
roses long ago, because of that spirit of restlessness within him, and
finally he had come to these wild, savage mountains and was content
here, where it was difficult even to picture t