on her yellow face. Suddenly a voice was heard
calling. She poked her head out of the shed, and answered coolly:

"All right!" Then, turning to me: "That's his mother looking after me."

She laughed into my face, witch-like, and we turned down the road.

When I awoke, the morning after this episode, I found the house darkened
with deep, soft snow, which had blown against the large west windows,
covering them with a screen. I went outside, and saw the valley all
white and ghastly below me, the trees beneath black and thin looking
like wire, the rock-faces dark between the glistening shroud, and the
sky above sombre, heavy, yellowish-dark, much too heavy for the world
below of hollow bluey whiteness figured with black. I felt I was in
a valley of the dead. And I sensed I was a prisoner, for the snow was
everywhere deep, and drifted in places. So all the morning I remained
indoors, looking up the drive at the shrubs so heavily plumed with snow,
at the gateposts raised high with a foot or more of extra whiteness.
Or I looked down into the white-and-black valley, that was utterly
motionless and beyond life, a hollow sarcophagus.

Nothing stirred the whole day--no plume fell off the shrubs, the valley
was as abstracted as a grove of death. I looked over at the tiny,
half-buried farms away on the bare uplands beyond the valley hollow,
and I thought of Tible in the snow, of the black, witch-like little
Mrs. Goyte. And the snow seemed to lay me bare to influences I wanted to
escape.

In the faint glow of half-clear light that came about four o'clock in
the afternoon, I was roused to see a motion in the snow away below, near
where the thorn-trees stood very black and dwarfed, like a little savage
group, in the dismal white. I watched closely. Yes, there was a flapping
and a struggle--a big bird, it must be, labouring in the snow. I
wondered. Our biggest birds, in the valley, were the large hawks that
often hung flickering opposite my windows, level with me, but high
above some prey on the steep valley-side. This was much too big for a
hawk--too big for any known bird. I searched in my mind for the largest
English wild birds--geese, buzzards.

Still it laboured and strove, then was still, a dark spot, then
struggled again. I went out of the house and down the steep slope,
at risk of breaking my leg between the rocks. I knew the ground so
well--and yet I got well shaken before I drew near the thorn-trees.

Yes, it was a bir