f the bitterest feeling she had ever experienced
passed over her; then she called reason to her aid and was obliged to
acknowledge that the act was but natural, and that from his standpoint
he was much more likely to need it than herself. But the disappointment,
coming so soon after hope, unnerved her, and she sank back in her chair,
giving herself up for lost.

How long she sat there with her eyes on the door, through which she
momentarily expected her assailant to reappear, she never knew. She was
conscious only of a sort of apathy that made movement difficult and even
breathing a task. In vain she tried to change her thoughts. In vain she
tried to follow her husband in fancy over the snow-covered roads and
into the gorge of the mountains. Imagination failed her at this point.
Do what she would, all was misty in her mind's eye, and she could not
see that wandering image. There was blankness between his form and her,
and no life or movement anywhere but here in the scene of her terror.

Her eyes were on a strip of rug that covered the entry floor, and
so strange was the condition of her mind that she found herself
mechanically counting the tassels that finished its edge, growing wroth
over one that was worn, till she hated that sixth tassel and mentally
determined that if she ever outlived this night she would strip them all
off and be done with them.

The wind had lessened, but the air had grown cooler and the snow made a
sharp sound where it struck the panes. She felt it falling, though she
had cut off all view of it. It seemed to her that a pall was settling
over the world and that she would soon be smothered under its folds.
Meanwhile no sound came from the kitchen, only that dreadful sense of
a doom creeping upon her--a sense that grew in intensity till she found
herself watching for the shadow of that lifted stick on the wall of the
entry, and almost imagined she saw the tip of it appearing, when without
any premonition, that fatal side door again blew in and admitted another
man of so threatening an aspect that she succumbed instantly before him
and forgot all her former fears in this new terror.

The second intruder was a negro of powerful frame and lowering aspect,
and as he came for-ward and stood in the doorway there was ob-servable
in his fierce and desperate countenance no attempt at the insinuation
of the other, only a fearful resolution that made her feel like a puppet
before him, and drove her, almos