the great maples he paused, two of them marking the entrance
to the wood road, and looked about him. The world was resolutely still.
The snow was not deep, but none of it had melted. It was of a uniform
whiteness and luster and the shadows in it were deeply blue. There were
tracks frozen into it all along the road, many of them old ones, others
just broken, the story of some animal's wandering. Then he turned into
the wood road and began to climb the rise, and as he went he was
conscious of an unaccountable excitement. Dick was responsible for that,
he told himself. Dick had waked his mind to old memories. This was, in
effect, and all owing to Dick, a tryst with Old Crow.

He remembered every step of the way, what he might find if he could
sweep off the snow or wait until June and let the mounting sun sweep it
according to its own method. Here at the right would be the great patch
of clintonia. Further in at the left was tiarella, with its darling
leaf, and along under the yellow birches the lady's slipper he had
transplanted, year after year, and that finally took root and showed a
fine sturdiness he had never seen exceeded elsewhere. He went on musing
over the permanence of things and the mutability of mortal joy,
wondering if, in this world He had made without remedies for its native
ills, God could take pleasure in the bleak framework of it. And when he
had nearly reached the top of the slope, the three firs, where a turn to
the left would bring him to the log cabin door, suddenly he stopped as
if his inner self heard the command to halt. He looked about him, and
his heart began to beat hard. But he was not surprised. What could be
more moving than the winter stillness of the woods in a spot all
memories? Yet he was in no welcoming mood for high emotion, and looking
up and about, to shake off the wood magic, there at a little distance at
his right, between pine boles, he saw her, the woman. She was tall and
slender, yet grandly formed. A blue cloak was wrapped about her and her
head was bare. Her face had a gaunt beauty such as he had never seen.
The eyes, richly blue but darkened by the startled pupil, were
bewildering in their soft yet steady appealingness. Her hair was parted
and carried back in waves extraordinarily thick and probably knotted
behind. That, of course, he could not see. But the little soft rings of
it about her forehead he noted absently. And her look was so full of
dramatic tension, of patient, n