ssy sheet of water that was partly frozen and partly
undulating toward the southern shore. The familiarity of it all began
to haunt her. Had she dreamed it--was she dreaming now? Perhaps it
was only a dream after all! Then, as if in a wave of clear thought,
she remembered it all. It was the lake, and she had been there with
the Sunday school children last summer on their picnic.

It came to her like a solution of all her troubles; it was so placid,
so still, so cold. A moment and all would be forgotten. She stood
with one foot on the creaking ice. It was but to walk a dozen steps to
the place where the ice was but a crash of crystal and that would end
it all. She was so weary of the eternal strife of things, she was so
glad to lay down the burden under which her back was bending to the
point of breaking.

And yet, there was the primitive instinct of self-preservation
combating her inclination, urging her on to make one more final effort.
Back and forth, through the snow about the lake she wandered; without
being able to decide. Her strength was fast ebbing. Which--which,
should it be? "God have mercy!" she cried, and fell unconscious.

CHAPTER XVII.

THE NIGHT IN THE SNOWSTORM.

"Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
Hides hills and woods, the river and the heaven."--_Emerson_.

All through that long, wild night David searched and shouted, to find
only snow and silence.

Through the darkness and the falling flakes he could not see more than
a foot ahead, and when he would stumble over a stone or the fallen
trunk of a tree, he would stoop down and search through the drifts with
his bare hands, thinking perhaps that she might have fallen, and not
finding her, he would again take up his fruitless search, while cold
fear gnawed at his heart.

At home in the warm farm house, sat the Squire who had done his duty.
The consciousness of having done it, however, did not fill him with
that cheerful glow of righteousness that is the reward of a good
conscience--on the contrary, he felt small. It might have been
imagination, but he felt, somehow, as if his wife and Kate were
shunning him. Once he had tried to take his wife's hand as she stood
with her face pressed to the window trying to see if she could make out
the dim outline of David returning with Anna, but she withdrew her hand
impatiently as s