The old door
behind her was covered with it, as if hung with ermine, and it looked
as white as an altar, beneath the grey front of the church, so bare and
smooth that not even a single flake had clung to it. The great saints,
those of the sloping surface especially, were clothed in it, and were
glistening in purity from their feet to their white beards. Still
higher, in the scenes of the tympanum, the outlines of the little saints
of the arches were designed most clearly on a dark background, and this
magic sect continued until the final rapture at the marriage of Agnes,
which the archangels appeared to be celebrating under a shower of white
roses. Standing upon her pillar, with her white branch of palm and her
white lamp, the Virgin Child had such purity in the lines of her body of
immaculate snow, that the motionless stiffness of cold seemed to congeal
around her the mystic transports of victorious youth. And at her feet
the other child, so miserable, white with snow--she also grew so stiff
and pale that it seemed as if she were turning to stone, and could
scarcely be distinguished from the great images above her.

At last, in one of the long line of houses in which all seemed to be
sleeping, the noise from the drawing up of a blind made her raise her
eyes. It was at her right hand, in the second story of a house at the
side of the Cathedral. A very handsome woman, a brunette about forty
years of age, with a placid expression of serenity, was just looking out
from there, and in spite of the terrible frost she kept her uncovered
arm in the air for a moment, having seen the child move. Her calm face
grew sad with pity and astonishment. Then, shivering, she hastily closed
the window. She carried with her the rapid vision of a fair little
creature with violet-coloured eyes under a head-covering of an old silk
handkerchief. The face was oval, the neck long and slender as a lily,
and the shoulders drooping; but she was blue from cold, her little hands
and feet were half dead, and the only thing about her that still showed
life was the slight vapour of her breath.

The child remained with her eyes upturned, looking at the house
mechanically. It was a narrow one, two stories in height, very old, and
evidently built towards the end of the fifteenth century. It was almost
sealed to the side of the Cathedral, between two buttresses, like a wart
which had pushed itself between the two toes of a Colossus. And thus
supported on ea