ve suffered
misfortune in the forest." And the voices again rose, this time more
subdued, breaking sometimes to a sob.

When they were silent, and all had risen after the last sign of the
cross, Maria went back to the window. The frost upon the panes made
of them so many fretted squares through which the eye could not
penetrate, shutting away the outside world; but Maria saw them not,
for the tears welled to her eyes and blinded her. She stood there
motionless, with arms hanging piteously by her side, a stricken
figure of grief; then a sudden anguish yet keener and more
unbearable seized upon her; blindly she opened the door and went out
upon the step.

The world that lay beyond the threshold, sunk in moveless white
repose, was of an immense serenity; but when Maria passed from the
sheltering walls the cold smote her like the hungry blade of a sword
and the forest leaped toward her in menace, its inscrutable face
concealing a hundred dreadful secrets which called aloud to her in
lamentable voices. With a little moan she drew back, and closing the
door sat shivering beside the stove. Numbness was yielding, sorrow
taking on an edge, and the hand that clutched her heart set itself
to devising new agonies, each one subtler and more cruel than the
last.

How he must have suffered, far off there amid the snows! So thought
she, as still her own face remembered the sting of the bitter air.
Men threatened by this fate had told her that death coming in such a
guise smote with gentle and painless hand-a hand that merely lulled
to sleep; but she could not make herself believe it, and all the
sufferings that Francois, might have endured before giving up and
falling to the white ground passed before her eyes.

No need for her to see the spot, too well she knew the winter
terrors of the great forest, the snow heaped to the firs' lower
branches, alders almost buried beneath it, birches and aspens naked
as skeletons and shuddering in the icy wind, a sunless sky above the
massed and gloomy spires of green. She sees Francois making his way
through the close-set trees, limbs stiffened with the cold, his skin
raw with that pitiless nor'wester, gnawed by hunger, stumbling with
fatigue, his feet so weary that with no longer strength to lift them
his snowshoes often catch the snow and throw him to his knees.

Doubtless when the storm abated he saw his error, knew that he was
walking toward the barren northland, turned at once and took t