trings, to
the harder gusts of wind. The cold was so intense that the ice did
not melt in the noonday sun, and there were no soft droppings and
gurglings to modify this rigor of white light and sound. Occasionally
a rabbit crossed Madelon's path, silent as a little gray scudding
shadow, and so swiftly that he did not reach one's consciousness
until he was out of sight. There was seldom a winter bird, even, in
sight. The ice on the trees and the pastures had locked and sealed
their larders. Their little beaks could not pierce it for seeds and
grubs, and so they were forced to repair to kitchen doors and
barnyards in quest of stray crumbs from the provender of men and
cattle.

The rabbits, and an ox-team drawing a sled laden with cedar logs,
slipping with shrill, long squeaks over the white road, driven by a
man with a red face in an ambush of frozen beard, were all the living
things she met for the first four miles. The man clambered stiffly
down from his sled just before he met her, and began walking,
stamping, rubbing his ears, and swinging his arms violently the
while. He stared hard at Madelon, and gave a sort of grunt as he
passed. It was an instinctive note of comradeship with another in a
situation hard for their common humanity. The man, toiling painfully
along that hard road, on that bitter day, with hands and feet half
frost-bitten, and face smarting as if with fire, his aching lungs
straining with the icy air, felt that he and the woman struggling
over the same road had common cause for wrath against this stress of
nature, and so made that half-surly, half-sympathetic grunt as he
passed her. But she did not respond. She did not even glance at him
as she went along. Her face glowed all over, red as a rose with the
freezing wind; she wrapped her cloak instinctively tight around her,
and walked a little stiffly, as if her feet might be somewhat numb;
but there was in her fixed dark eyes no recognition of anything but
some end she had in view beyond his ken.

The man stopped and looked seriously after her, and past her down the
road. "Wonder what she's up to!" he muttered. Then he struggled on
after his oxen, who plodded along with goat's-beards of their frozen
breath hanging from their jaws.

Two miles farther on there was a sudden loud blast of a horn, and
following upon it a great jangle of bells and the tramp of hoofs, and
Madelon knew the Ware and Kingston stage was coming. Presently the
top of the coach