word mother had broken up the ice at her heart. She pushed the hound
from her bosom, and staggering to her feet, looked to the right and
left. No one was near. The pale quiver of the snow flakes, and the naked
tree boughs, trembling and sighing together, was all that she could make
out. But the word mother still sounded in her ear, and the sentence
uttered to her sleep grew trumpet-toned, and seemed wailed back to her
by the storm.

"'The house upon the hill-side!' where is it?" she cried. "Which way
shall I go? Answer me, thou voice of the storm! is it north or south, to
the right or left? Answer me--or if I am indeed mad, be silent and let
me die!"

Then, through the drifting snow flakes that settled down heavier and
heavier, there came a voice clear and musical, like the low tones of a
flute, half-singing, half-speaking, which might have been the disguise
of some voice that feared detection.

"To the southward--to the southward, where a hearth gives forth its
white smoke, and your mother awaits her child."

Then, with a wild laugh, ending in sobs that wasted themselves on the
silence, Lina sprang away southward, always with the storm beating in
her face, and the snow weltering like a shroud around her feet.

Sometimes she would pause in a rift of the hills and look wistfully upon
the bed of sere leaves and feathery snow, tempting her to sink down and
die, with the grim hemlock boughs, plumed with snow wreaths drooping
over her, and lulled by the gurgle of unseen waters wandering to the
river, under their jewelled network of ice, but she resisted the
impulse, and still bent her way to the south, while the little dog, so
delicate and yet so faithful, rushed after her without a whine, as if he
knew, gentle creature, that a cry of pain, added to her own sorrow,
would be enough to smite away all her insane strength and leave her
prostrate upon the white earth.

At last she came out of the woods upon a hill-side covered with the
tangled undergrowth that follows a fire upon the hills. The trunk of an
old cedar tree, blackened and charred to the roots, warned her of a
close approach to the river, and in the distance she saw a wreath of dim
smoke curling up through the snow. Leaving the cedar-tree on her right,
Lina toiled up the hill, and crossed a ravine darkened with great white
pines and spruce trees. At the bottom, a mountain stream broke through
ten thousand fairy chains of ice, and melting the pearly foam of the