est-room, the candle in her hand, Gladys had a sudden keen intimation
that she was herself but human, endowed with muscles susceptible of
overstrain, with nerves of sensitive fibre, with instincts importunate
with the cry of self-interest, with impulses toward collapse, tears,
terrors, anxieties--all in revolt against the sedulous constraint of
will. The light of the candle in her hand, thrown upward on her face,
showed the fictitious animation that she had sustained vanish out of its
lineaments, as life itself might flicker to extinction, and leave a mask
like death. It was a tragic mask. Her lids fell over her hopeless eyes;
her lips drooped; the flush of her splendid florid beauty had faded as if
it had never bloomed. She discovered that she was gasping in the dull,
chill air. She leaned against the balustrade of the stairs, limp, inert,
as if every impetus of vigor had deserted her. But it would never do for
her to faint, she reflected. She must act for others, with just judgment,
with foresight, with effective housewifely care, and with good heart and
courage.

"I must think for the rest--as Ned would, if he were here," she said,
still half fainting. She got the window open hard by, and a vagrant gust
of the cold air stung her face as with a lash. But she was out of the
direct course of the blast as it came shrilly fluttering from over the
roof, and she could maintain her position, although she could scarcely
breathe in the keen frigidity. Snow had fallen, deeper than she had ever
seen. With it had come that strange quality of visibility that seems to
appertain to a sheeted world like an inherent luminosity; or was it
perchance some vague diffusion of light from the clouded moon, skulking
affrighted somewhere in the grim and sullen purlieus of the sky? She
listened, thinking to hear the stir of horses in their stalls, some sound
from barn or byre, the wakening of the restless poultry, all snugly
housed; but the somnolent stillness of the muffled earth continued
unbroken, and only the frantic wind screamed and howled and wailed.

One sombre hour succeeded another as if the succession were endless.
Long, long before there was the sense of a boreal dawn in the chill
darkness, the house stood in readiness, though none came. The servants
were presently astir; the fires were freshly flaring, the furniture
rearranged. In view of the freeze, the gardener had seen fit to cut all
the blooms in the pit to save them from bligh