ollows
within the wood, sometimes stumbling over frozen furrows as she crossed
corners of the ploughed land, walking all the time in helpless, hopeless
anger.

When, however, she came back behind the house to that part of the
clearing bounded by the narrow and not very deep ravine which running
water had cut into the side of the hill, she seemed to gather some
reviving sensations from the variety which the bed of the brook
presented to her view. Here, on some dozen feet of steeply sloping rock
and earth, which on either side formed the trough of the brook,
vegetable life was evidently more delicate and luxuriant than elsewhere,
in the season when it had sway. Even now, when the reign of the frost
held all such life in abeyance, this grave of the dead summer lacked
neither fretted tomb nor wreathing garland; for above, the bittersweet
hung out heavy festoons of coral berries over the pall of its faded
leaves, and beneath, on frond of fern and stalk of aster, and on rough
surface of lichen-covered rock, the frost had turned the spray of water
to white crystals, and the stream, with imprisoned far-off murmur, made
its little leaps within fairy palaces of icicles, and spread itself in
pools whose leafy contents gave colours of mottled marble to the ice
that had grown upon them. It was on the nearer bank of this stream,
where, a little below, it curved closer to the house, that her father,
falling with a frost-loosened rock, had received his fatal injury. Out
of the pure idleness of despondency it occurred to the girl that, from
the point at which she had now arrived, she might obtain a new view of
the small landslip which had caused the calamity.

She cast her arms round a lithe young birch whose silver trunk bent from
the top of the bank, and thus bridging the tangle of shrub and vine she
hung over the short precipice to examine the spot with sad curiosity.

She herself could hardly have told what thoughts passed through her mind
as, childlike, she thus lapsed from hard anger into temporary amusement.
But greater activity of mind did come with the cessation of movement and
the examination of objects which stimulated such fancy as she possessed.
She looked at the beauty in the ravine beneath her, and at the rude
destruction that falling earth and rock had wrought in it a few yards
further down. She began to wonder whether, if the roots of the tree on
which she was at full length stretched should give way in the same
mann