his heart steadily and calmly beating, unshaken by the
agonies of old. Was he the same man? It seemed almost impossible. And
now Maurice said to himself again that perhaps after all the cry of the
child had been imagination, a symptom of illness in him from which he
had--perhaps even through some obscure physical change--recovered
completely. Yet Lily had believed in the cry and believed in the unquiet
spirit behind it. But women are romantic, credulous--

The train rocked in a rapture of motion. Maurice drew his rugs more
closely round him. With the advance of night the cold grew more deadly.

Towards morning the pace of the train incessantly decreased. Huge masses
of snow had drifted upon the line. For a rising wind drove it together
under hedgerows and walls until expanding upon the track, it impeded the
progress of the engines. Maurice let down a window and peered out. He
saw only snow, stationary or floating, at rest in shadowy heaps that
fled back in the darkness, or falling in a veil before his eyes. It
seemed to him now as if a hand were stretched out to stay his impetuous
advance to Lily. The train went slower and slower. At last, towards
morning, it stopped. A long and distracted whistling pierced the air.
There was a jerk, a movement forward, then another stoppage. They were
snowed up in the middle of a desolate stretch of country, with a
blizzard raging round them.

How many hours passed before they were released Maurice never knew. He
lay wrapped up to the eyes, numbed and passive, of body, but mentally
travelling with an extraordinary rapidity. At first he was in the
valley. He saw it, as he had seen it in old days, in snow, its river
ice-bound, its waterfall arrested in the midst of an army of crystal
spears. White mountains rose round it to a low sky, curved, like a
bosom, in grey cloud shapes. The air was sharp and silent, clearer than
southern air, a thing that seemed to hold itself alert in its narrow
prison on the edge of solitude. He heard the bark of a dog on the hills,
in search of the starving sheep.

Then he came to one of those new houses of which the Canon had spoken,
and in it he found Lily. She was pale, but he scarcely noticed that,
engrossed in the strangeness of finding her there. For in the south he
had never fully realised Lily at home in the valley, walking on the
desolate narrow roads by day, sleeping in the shadow of the hills by
night. Now he began to realise her there. Where wou