n colour. At first scarcely more
than a warm tinge to the snow, it took shape as I watched it, and then
body also. It was now opaque within semi-transparency; one could trace
an outline, a form. Then I made out of it a woman dressed in yellow; a
slim woman, tawny-haired, in a thin smock of lemon-yellow which
flacked and bellied in the gale. Her hair blew out to it in snaky
streamers, sideways. Her head was bent to meet the cold, her bare
white arms were crossed, and hugged her shoulders, as if to keep her
bosom warm. From mid-thigh downward she was bare and very white, yet
distinct upon the snow. That was the white of chilled flesh I could
see. Though she wore but a single garment, and that of the thinnest
and shortest, though she suffered cold, hugged herself and shivered,
she was not of our nature, to die of such exposure. Her eyes, as I
could guess, were long-enduring and steadfast. Her lips were not blue,
though her teeth seemed to chatter; she was not rigid with the
stiffening that precedes frozen death. Drawing near her by degrees,
coming within fifteen yards of where she stood and passioned, though
she saw me, waited for me, in a way expected me, she showed neither
fear nor embarrassment, nor appealed by looks for shelter. She was,
rather, like a bird made tame by winter, that finds the lesser fear
swallowed up in a greater. For myself, as when one finds one's self
before a new thing, one stands and gazes, so was I before this being
of the wild. I would go no nearer, speak I could not. But I had no
fear. She was new to me not strange. I felt that she and I belonged to
worlds apart; that as soon might I hope to be familiar with fox or
marten as with her. My little black dog was of the same mind. He was
glad when I joined him, and wagged his little body--tail he has
none--to say so. But he had no eyes for me, nor I for him. We stood
together for company, and filled our eyes with the tenant of the
waste. How long we watched her I have no notion, but the day fell
swiftly in and found us there.

She was, I take it, quite young, she was slim and of ordinary
proportions. When I say that I mean that she had nothing inhuman about
her stature, was neither giant nor pygmy. Whether she was what we call
good-looking or not I find it impossible to determine, for when
strangeness is so added to beauty as to absorb and transform it, our
standards are upset and balances thrown out. She was pale to the lips,
had large, fixed and