cold
to the bone, than for the sense of companionship. The homely flames were
like flames in remembered fireplaces; their voices were as the voices of
those other fires; their light, though showing only cold rock walls and
rude camp equipment, was the closest thing she had to companionship. She
came close to the fire and for a long time would not move from it.

She went to the wall King had built, moving the canvas aside just enough
to look out, and stood there a long time. A dead hush lay over the
world. There was no wind; the snow in great unbroken, feathery crystals
fell softly, thick in the sky, dropping ceaselessly and soundlessly. It
clung to the limbs of trees, making of each branch a thick white arm,
stilling the pine-needles, binding them together in the sheath which
forbade them to shiver and rustle. It lay in sludgy messes in the pools
of the stream and curled over the edges of the steep banks and coated
the boulders; it lay its white command for silence upon the racing
water. A world dead-white and dead-still. That unbroken silence which
exists nowhere else as it does in the wastes of snow and which lies upon
the soul like a positive inhibition against the slightest human-made
sound. No wind to stir a dry twig; no dry twig but was manacled and
muffled; no dead leaves to rustle, since all dead leaves lay deeper than
death under the snow. Gloria's sensation as she stood as still as the
wilderness all about her and stared out across the ridges was that of
one who had suddenly and without warning gone stone-deaf. The stillness
was so absolute that it seemed to crush the soul within her. She went
back hastily to her fire, glad to hear the crackle of the flames,
grateful to have the emptiness made somewhat less the yawning void by
the small sound of a bit of wood rolling apart on the rock floor.

She was hungry, but she had no heart for cooking. She ate little scraps
of cold food left over from last night; she nibbled at a last bit of the
slab chocolate; she filled a pot with snow gathered at the cave mouth
and set it on the coals to get water to drink. And again, having nothing
else to do and urged restlessly to some form of activity, she hurried
back to the canvas flap and watched the falling snow, hearkening to the
stillness. For in the spell of the snow country one is forced to the
attitude of one who listens and who hears the great hush, and who, like
the enchanted world about it, heeds and obeys, and when he