han ever before. It seemed to come closer to her,
and to fill an emptiness that ached in her heart. She tried to
be patient with her husband. He and his hired man usually played
California Jack in the evening. Marie sat sewing or crocheting and
tried to take a friendly interest in the game, but she was always
thinking about the wide fields outside, where the snow was drifting
over the fences; and about the orchard, where the snow was falling
and packing, crust over crust. When she went out into the dark
kitchen to fix her plants for the night, she used to stand by the
window and look out at the white fields, or watch the currents of
snow whirling over the orchard. She seemed to feel the weight of
all the snow that lay down there. The branches had become so hard
that they wounded your hand if you but tried to break a twig. And
yet, down under the frozen crusts, at the roots of the trees, the
secret of life was still safe, warm as the blood in one's heart;
and the spring would come again! Oh, it would come again!

II

If Alexandra had had much imagination she might have guessed what
was going on in Marie's mind, and she would have seen long before
what was going on in Emil's. But that, as Emil himself had more
than once reflected, was Alexandra's blind side, and her life had
not been of the kind to sharpen her vision. Her training had all
been toward the end of making her proficient in what she had undertaken
to do. Her personal life, her own realization of herself, was
almost a subconscious existence; like an underground river that
came to the surface only here and there, at intervals months apart,
and then sank again to flow on under her own fields. Nevertheless,
the underground stream was there, and it was because she had so much
personality to put into her enterprises and succeeded in putting
it into them so completely, that her affairs prospered better than
those of her neighbors.

There were certain days in her life, outwardly uneventful, which
Alexandra remembered as peculiarly happy; days when she was close
to the flat, fallow world about her, and felt, as it were, in her
own body the joyous germination in the soil. There were days,
too, which she and Emil had spent together, upon which she loved
to look back. There had been such a day when they were down on
the river in the dry year, looking over the land. They had made
an early start one morning and had driven a long way before noon.
When Emil said he