an to grumble. On the mountains was an
icy crust that made "running" dangerous; they wanted the frozen, dry,
and powdery snow that makes for speed, renders steering easier and
falling less severe. But the keen east wind showed no signs of changing
for a whole ten days. Then, suddenly, there came a touch of softer air
and the weather-wise began to prophesy.

Hibbert, who was delicately sensitive to the least change in earth or
sky, was perhaps the first to feel it. Only he did not prophesy. He knew
through every nerve in his body that moisture had crept into the air,
was accumulating, and that presently a fall would come. For he responded
to the moods of Nature like a fine barometer.

And the knowledge, this time, brought into his heart a strange little
wayward emotion that was hard to account for--a feeling of unexplained
uneasiness and disquieting joy. For behind it, woven through it rather,
ran a faint exhilaration that connected remotely somewhere with that
touch of delicious alarm, that tiny anticipating "dread," that so
puzzled him when he thought of his next meeting with his skating
companion of the night. It lay beyond all words, all telling, this queer
relationship between the two; but somehow the girl and snow ran in a
pair across his mind.

Perhaps for imaginative writing-men, more than for other workers, the
smallest change of mood betrays itself at once. His work at any rate
revealed this slight shifting of emotional values in his soul. Not that
his writing suffered, but that it altered, subtly as those changes of
sky or sea or landscape that come with the passing of afternoon into
evening--imperceptibly. A subconscious excitement sought to push
outwards and express itself ... and, knowing the uneven effect such
moods produced in his work, he laid his pen aside and took instead to
reading that he had to do.

Meanwhile the brilliance passed from the sunshine, the sky grew slowly
overcast; by dusk the mountain tops came singularly close and sharp; the
distant valley rose into absurdly near perspective. The moisture
increased, rapidly approaching saturation point, when it must fall in
snow. Hibbert watched and waited.

And in the morning the world lay smothered beneath its fresh white
carpet. It snowed heavily till noon, thickly, incessantly, chokingly, a
foot or more; then the sky cleared, the sun came out in splendour, the
wind shifted back to the east, and frost came down upon the mountains
with its ke