ing towards her just beyond the turn of the trail.
She even thought that she could hear his steps upon the daunting
stillness. With her heart quivering, yet uplifted by an exaltation of
hope, she ran on, not daring to glance again into the woods. To
sustain her courage she kept thinking of the look of gay astonishment
that would flash into her father's face as he met her running towards
him--just around the turn of the trail!

The turn was nearly a quarter of a mile distant, but the child reached
it at last. With a little cry of confident relief she rushed forward.
The long trail--now half in shadow from the slight change in its
direction--stretched out empty before her. In the excess of her
disappointment she burst into tears and sat down on the snow
irresolutely.

Her first impulse--after she had cried for a minute, and wiped her
eyes with the little mittens, which promptly stiffened in the stinging
frost--was to face about and run for home as fast as she could. But
when she turned and glanced behind her, the backward path appeared
quite different. When she no longer faced the moonlight, the world
took on an unfriendly, sinister look. There were unknown terrors all
along that implacable blue-white way through the dread blackness of
the woods. Sobbing with desolation, she turned again towards the moon.
Ahead, for all her fears, the trail still held something of the
glamour and the dazzle. Ahead, too, as she reminded herself, was
surely her father, hastening to meet her, only not quite so near as
she had imagined. Summoning back her courage, and comforting her
lonely spirit with thoughts of what Santa Claus was going to bring
her, she picked herself up and continued her journey at a hurried
little walk.

She had not gone more than a few steps, when a strange, high sound,
from somewhere far behind her, sent her heart into her throat and
quickened her pace to a run.

Again came that high, long-drawn, quavering sound; and the child's
heart almost stopped beating. If only she could see her father coming!
She had never heard any sound just like that; it was not savage, nor
very loud, but somehow it seemed to carry a kind of horror on its
floating cadence. It reminded her, very faintly, of the howling of
some dogs that she had heard in the Settlement. She was not afraid of
dogs. But she knew there were no dogs in the forest.

Just as she was beginning to lose her breath and slacken her pace,
that terrible cry came wave