owerless to express. A year
before, Thayer could strike the tragic note, never the pathetic.

Nevertheless, the pathos was apparently merely a matter of the vocal
cords. The tall, alert, well-groomed man who stood at the snow-veiled
window in no way suggested being a candidate for sympathy. His eyes were
clear, his brows unfurrowed. Moreover, one could never dream of
condoling with the owner of such a voice. Taken quite by itself, its
possession would outweigh an almost infinite number of human woes.

"_Ever thicker, thicker, thicker
Froze the ice on lake and river,
Ever deeper, deeper, deeper
Fell the snow_--"

_Hiawatha's_ wigwam might well have been just beyond the spruce thicket,
Thayer reflected. The description was too accurate to be artistic; it
amounted to mere photography. As far as his own eyes could see, the
earth lay buried in a deep, soft blanket of snow, and the air above was
misty with flakes which neither fell nor scurried before the wind, but
hung apparently motionless in the still, cold air. All through the
preceding night, however, the wind had blown fiercely. The snow lay
heaped in heavy, irregular drifts across the open plain; but under the
trees it was rolled up into soft waves whose tops curled over as
daintily as the waves had curled over on the moonlit beach of Monomoy.
The lake was frozen over and snow-covered; but the creek that came
rushing down to meet it was too swift to be overtaken by the frost, and
it showed, an inky-dark, sinuous line of open water, winding away and
away among the trees, now losing itself in a thicket of alders, now
drawing a straight black mark across an open stretch of meadow where the
frost-flowers on its banks offered a delicate substitute for their
summer kin.

Half a mile away to the south, the mountain rose abruptly, its face of
sheer rock making a dark scar on the winter landscape, a scar crossed
with long white bands and bars of ice which, glacier-wise, were creeping
over the edge of the cliff as if seeking to veil its sinister face.
Against the base of the mountain, close to the inky creek, another patch
of darkness stood out in bold relief. This patch was the Lorimers'
cottage.

In spite of the haunting melancholy of his song, Thayer looked out at
the cottage and at the storm with a feeling of supreme content. Lorimer
hated storms with a catlike fervor; it was an old-time peculiarity of
his, dating from their student days in Goettingen.