ver the frozen road in the ecstasy
of her new-found delight. The weight of weary months of gathering
suspense seemed in one moment to have fallen from her forever. Half
laughing, half weeping, she bounded along, the dog sporting beside
her. Her quick words rippled on the frosty air. Occasionally she
encountered a flood that swept across the way from the hills above to
the lake beneath, but her light foot tripped over it before a hand
could be offered her. Their path lay along the pack-horse road by the
side of the mere, and time after time she would scud down to the
water's edge to pluck the bracken that grew there, or to test the thin
ice with her foot. She would laugh and then be silent, and then break
out into laughter again. She would prattle to herself unconsciously
and then laugh once more. All the world seemed made anew to this happy
girl to-night.

True enough, nature meant her for a heartsome lass. Her hair was dark,
and had a tangled look, as though lately caught in brambles or still
thick with burrs. Her dark eyebrows and long lashes shaded the darkest
of black-brown eyes. Her mouth was alive with sensibility. Every shade
of feeling could play upon her face. Her dress was loose, and somewhat
negligently worn; one never felt its presence or knew whether it were
poor or fine. Her voice, though soft, was generally high-pitched, not
like the whirl of wind through the trees, but like its sigh through
the long grass, and came, perhaps, to the mountain girl from the
effort to converse above the sound of these natural voices. There was
a tremor in her voice sometimes, and, when she was taken unawares, a
sidelong look in her eyes. There was something about her in these
serious moods that laid hold of the imagination. She had surely a well
of strength which had been given for her own support and the solace of
others at some future moment, only too terrible. But not to-night, as
she tripped along under the moonlight, did the consciousness of that
moment overshadow her.

And what of Ralph, who strode solemnly by her side? A change had come
over him of late. He spoke little, and never at all of the scenes he
had witnessed in his long campaign--never of his own share in them. He
had become at once an active and a brooding man. The shadow of a
supernatural presence seemed to hang over everything. Tonight that
shadow was blacker than before.

In the fulness of her joy Rotha had not marked the tone in which Ralph
spoke wh