"To-morrow! Day after to-morrow! Any time
after this! But no quarrels to-day!" and his face softened.

Before the barn door, where the snow had been tramped down by the stock
and seeds of grain lay scattered, he flushed a flock of little birds,
nearly all strangers to each other. Some from the trees about the yard;
some from the thickets, fences, and fields farther away. As he threw
open the barn doors, a few more, shyer still, darted swiftly into
hiding. He heard the quick heavy flap of wings on the joists of the
oats loft overhead, and a hawk swooped out the back door and sailed low
away.

The barn had become a battle-field of hunger and life. This was the
second day of famine--all seeds being buried first under ice and now
under snow; swift hunger sending the littler ones to this granary, the
larger following to prey on them. To-night there would be owls and in
the darkness tragedies. In the morning, perhaps, he would find a
feather which had floated from a breast. A hundred years ago, he
reflected, the wolves would have gathered here also and the cougar and
the wildcat for bigger game.

It was sunset as he left the stable, his work done. Beside the yard
gate there stood a locust tree, and on a bough of this, midway up, for
he never goes to the tree-tops at this season, David saw a cardinal. He
was sitting with his breast toward the clear crimson sky; every twig
around him silver filigree; the whole tree glittering with a million
gems of rose and white, gold and green; and wherever a fork, there a
hanging of snow. The bird's crest was shot up. He had come forth to
look abroad upon this strange wreck of nature and peril to his kind.
David had scarcely stopped before him when with a quick shy movement he
dived down into one of his ruined winter fortresses-a cedar dismembered
and flattened out, never to rise again.

The supper that evening was a very quiet one. David felt that his
father's eyes were often on him reproachfully; and that his mother's
were approvingly on his father's. Time and again during the meal the
impulse well-nigh overcame him to speak to his father then and there;
but he knew it would be a cruel, angry scene; and each time the face of
Gabriella restrained him. It was for peace; and his heart shut out all
discord from around that new tenderer figure of her which had come
forth within him this day.

Soon even the trouble at home was forgotten; he was on his way through
the deep snow toward her.