almost hit the girl's forehead with the door as she stood
praying outside.

Ice! Ice! They both ran down together. But the cook was at
her wits' end too; no, there was no ice, they had not thought any would
be required.

"Go and get some, quick."

The man-servant rushed off, but oh! before he could reach the shop,
awake somebody and return, the flame upstairs might have burnt so
fiercely that there was nothing left of the poor little candle. The man
looked round, almost out of his mind with anxiety, and he saw Cilia
with a chopper and pail running to the back-door.

"I'm going to fetch some ice."

"But where?"

"Down there." She laughed and raised her arm so that the chopper
glittered. "There's plenty of ice in the lake. I'm going to chop
some."

She was already out of the kitchen; he ran after her without a hat,
without a cap, with only the thin coat on he wore in the house.

The terrors of the night gave way before the faint hope, and he did
not feel the cold at first. But when the villas were lost sight of
behind the pines, when he stood quit alone on the banks of the frozen
lake that shone like a hard shield of metal, surrounded by silent black
giants, he felt so cold that he thought he should freeze to death. And
he was filled with a terror he had never felt the like to before
a--deadly fear.

Was not that a voice he heard? Hallo! Did it not come from the wood
that had the appearance of a thicket in the blue, confusing glitter of
the moonlight? And it mocked and bantered, half laughed, half moaned.
Terrible. Who was shrieking so?

"The owl's screeching," said Cilia, and she raised the chopper over
her shoulder with both hands and let it whiz down with all her might.
The ice at the edge splintered, It cracked and broke; the sound was
heard far out on the lake, a growling, a grumbling, a voice out of the
deep.

Would the boy die--would he live?

The man gazed around him with a distraught look. O God! Yes, that
was also in vain--would also be in vain. Despite all his courage he
felt weak as he stood there. Here was night and loneliness and the wood
and the water--he had seen it all before, it was familiar to him--but
it had never been like this, so quiet and still, so alive with terrors.
The trees had never been so high before, the lake never so large, the
world in which they lived never so far away.

Something seemed to be lurking behind that large pine--was a
gamekeeper not standing there aiming