rned him
weak and unresisting.

"Our home is--_here_!" A burst of wild, high laughter, loud and shrill,
accompanied the words. It was like a whistling wind. The wind _had_
risen, and clouds obscured the moon. "A little higher--where we cannot
hear the wicked bells," she cried, and for the first time seized him
deliberately by the hand. She moved, was suddenly close against his
face. Again she touched him.

And Hibbert tried to turn away in escape, and so trying, found for the
first time that the power of the snow--that other power which does not
exhilarate but deadens effort--was upon him. The suffocating weakness
that it brings to exhausted men, luring them to the sleep of death in
her clinging soft embrace, lulling the will and conquering all desire
for life--this was awfully upon him. His feet were heavy and entangled.
He could not turn or move.

The girl stood in front of him, very near; he felt her chilly breath
upon his cheeks; her hair passed blindingly across his eyes; and that
icy wind came with her. He saw her whiteness close; again, it seemed,
his sight passed through her into space as though she had no face. Her
arms were round his neck. She drew him softly downwards to his knees. He
sank; he yielded utterly; he obeyed. Her weight was upon him,
smothering, delicious. The snow was to his waist.... She kissed him
softly on the lips, the eyes, all over his face. And then she spoke his
name in that voice of love and wonder, the voice that held the accent of
two others--both taken over long ago by Death--the voice of his mother,
and of the woman he had loved.

He made one more feeble effort to resist. Then, realising even while he
struggled that this soft weight about his heart was sweeter than
anything life could ever bring, he let his muscles relax, and sank back
into the soft oblivion of the covering snow. Her wintry kisses bore him
into sleep.

VII

They say that men who know the sleep of exhaustion in the snow find no
awakening on the hither side of death.... The hours passed and the moon
sank down below the white world's rim. Then, suddenly, there came a
little crash upon his breast and neck, and Hibbert--woke.

He slowly turned bewildered, heavy eyes upon the desolate mountains,
stared dizzily about him, tried to rise. At first his muscles would not
act; a numbing, aching pain possessed him. He uttered a long, thin cry
for help, and heard its faintness swallowed by the wind. And then he
u