o, what it meant to have her life emptied of
Jack's roisterous personality. She had learned to doubt the
infallibility of her own judgments, the justice of her own viewpoints.
She had attained a clarity of vision that enabled her to see herself a
failure where she had taken it for granted that she was a success. She
had failed as a mother. She had not taught her son to trust her, to
love her--and she had discovered how much she craved his love and his
trust.

Now she was learning other things. For the first time in her sheltered
life Mrs. Singleton Corey knew what it meant to be cold; bitterly
cold--cold to the middle of her bones. As Murphy had predicted, a tree
had fallen across the trail, so close to their passing that they had
heard the crash of it and had come up to see the branches still
quivering from the impact. Before then Mrs. Singleton Corey had
learned the feel of biting cold, when she waited on a bald nose of the
hill while three shovels lifted the snow out of the road so that they
could go on. Her unaccustomed ears had learned the sound of
able-bodied swearing because the horseman had taken a short-cut over
the hill and so had not broken the trail here for the team.

Then, because the driver had not prepared for the emergency of fallen
trees--rather, because the labor of removing a section would have been
too long even if they had brought axes and a cross-cut saw--she
learned how it felt to be plodding through snow to her aristocratic
knees. She had to walk a mile and a half to reach Toll-Gate cabin,
which was the only shelter on the mountainside, save the cabin of
Murphy and Mike, which was out of the question. She had to walk, since
she declined to ride one of the horses bareback; so she was tired, for
the first time in her pampered life, and she knew that always before
then she had merely played at being tired.

The driver, being unable to go farther with the sleigh, and having a
merciful regard for his four horses, turned back when the men had
lifted the sleigh around so that it faced townward. So Mrs. Singleton
Corey had the novel experience of walking with the assistance of
Murphy, whose hands were eager to help the lady, whose tongue was
eager to while away the wearisome journey with friendly converse,
whose breath was odorous of bad whisky. The other two men went ahead
with the blankets and the gunny-sack of supplies, and broke trail for
Murphy and the lady whose mission remained altogether a my