pleasure and relaxation. Surely at your age you deserve rest! Your
own have ceased to need you--why invite others?"

She looked strangely at me and in the dusk I saw her face white.

"There!" I went on, "you have harrowed yourself unnecessarily with that
poor creature's pain and want--surely you could have sent money? There
are people whose sole business it is to attend to such cases, and their
nerves are coarser than yours--they are not so wrung by what is daily
work to them."

At that moment a great fall of snow slid from one of the sloping roofs,
so that the air was white before us. It swept to the ground with a
dense, rushing crash and heaped itself into fantastic towers and walls;
close by a red lantern shone out; the wind moaned sadly.

"Look! look!" she cried, one hand at her side, "the Dunes again! Surely
you see that Castle, too? Or is it the sign--Oh, I am ready! Believe me,
I am ready!"

I caught her hand.

"Those are no dunes, my dear friend, only black shadows on the snow of
your own lands," I assured her, "and it is one of your own men with a
lantern going on your own errand. It is the fallen snow that takes those
strange spire-like shapes--no castle. This wind wails too much for your
nerves. Look in, at the fire and the warm hall."

"No, no," she said quietly, "I love to look out--I am not afraid. I
never know when I may see the Castle. And what you said about my
rest.... Well, it seems to open my lips. It was on just such a night
... how cold the stars were! And I had nearly lost myself--hunting for
my rest! When the moon rises I will tell you."

And then I knew that I was to hear one of those strange experiences of
hers. As always, she spoke quickly, often halting for long between swift
gushes of narrative, now as one who reads from an old book about a
stranger, now like the adventurer himself. She did not always or
steadily employ the style into which I have thrown her words, but she
wrapped me in an atmosphere, and from that and the remembrance of a
rising winter moon and a still, cold night, I write.

* * * * *

Her old friend the great physician, who now, in the evening of his busy
life, attended only upon those whose necessities baffled the less
experienced, pursed his lips and stared at her out of a grizzle of white
hair.

"And what will you do," he asked abruptly, "when I have convinced them
that you are unable to keep up these various relations that h