p grief.
Miss Chris had put aside her own sorrow and gone back to the management
of the house; only the girl, worn, idle, tragic, haunted the reminders
of her loss. Coming upon the general's old slouch hat on the rack, she
had grasped it in sudden passionate longing; at the sight of his
half-filled pipe she had rushed from the room and from the house. The
faint scent of tobacco about the furniture was a continual torture to
her. In the great chamber next the parlour she would sit for hours,
staring at the cold white bed, shivering before the fireless hearth. The
place chilled her like a vault; but she would linger wretchedly until
led away by Miss Chris, when she would sob upon that broad, unselfish
bosom.

December passed; the unsunned earth turned itself for a winter rest.
January came, swift and changeful. With February a snowstorm swept from
the north, driving southward. At first they felt it in the air; then the
swollen clouds chased overhead; at last the white flakes arrived,
falling, falling, falling. Through the night the storm made a glistening
mantle for the darkness; through the day it hid sombre sky and sombre
earth in a spotless veil. It covered the far country to the distant
forests; it weighted the ancient cedars until their green branches bent
to earth; it wrapped the gravelled walk in a winding sheet; it filled
the hollows of the box bushes until they hardened into hills of ice. The
snow was followed by cold winds. The ground froze in the night. Long
icicles formed on the naked trees, the window panes bore a lacework of
frost.

One afternoon, when the landscape was white and hard, Eugenia went out
into the deserted sheep pasture where the dead oak stood. A winter
sunset was burning like a bonfire in the west, and as far as the red
horizon swept an unbroken waste of snow. The rail fences shone silver in
their coat of frost, and from the blackened tree above her pendants of
ice were shot with light. Across the field a flock of gaunt crows flew,
casting purple shadows.

Eugenia leaned against the oak and stared vacantly at the landscape--at
the sunset, and at the waste of snow, across which flitted the demoniac
shadows of the crows. Her eyes saw only the desolation and the death;
they were sealed to the grandeur.

A sense of her own loneliness swept over her with the loneliness of
nature. Her own isolation--the isolation of a strong soul in
pain--walled her apart as with a wall of ice. That assurance