'I don't wonder you laugh,' he said, feebly beginning to laugh himself a
little.

But she did not make the slightest reply. Her face was crimson; the
ripples of her laughter went over her form as ripples of wind over a
young tree.

He was forced to leave her thus. By a miracle of determination, as it
seemed, he freed his right shoe and made slow and wary strides forward.
He saw that he had exaggerated the width of his snow-shoes, but his
progress now was still made upon the plan of keeping his feet wide
apart, although not too wide for motion. He knew that this was not the
right method; he knew that she peered at him between her fingers and was
more convulsed with laughter at his every step. He was thankful to think
that the falling flakes must soon begin to obscure his figure, but he
did not dare to try another plan of walking while she watched, lest she
should see him stop again.

CHAPTER V

Courthope had struck across to the main road at right angles to the
poplar avenue. The poplars stood slim, upright, more like a stiff and
regular formation of feathery seaweed growing out of a frozen ocean than
like trees upon a plain. He was nearing a grove of elm and birch which
he had not seen the evening before; by the almost hidden rails of the
fence there were half-buried shrubs. So dry, so hard, so absolutely
without bud or sere leaf was the interlacing outline of the trees and
shrubs, that they too seemed to be some strange product of this new sort
of ocean; they did not remind him of verdant glades. Not that beauty was
absent, nor charm, but the scene was strange, very strange; the domain
of the laughing princess, on whom he had turned his back, was, in the
daylight, more than ever an enchanted land which he could fancy to be
unknown in story and until now unexplored by man. Such ideas only came
to him by snatches; the rest of him, mind and body, was summed up in a
fierce determination to catch the thief and bring back his spoils.
Whether by this he would prove himself honest or guilty, he neither knew
nor felt that he cared.

Gradually, as he thought less about his snow-shoes, he found that the
wide lateral swing which he had been giving to his leg was unneeded.
Strange as it seemed, the large rackets did not interfere when he took
an ordinary step. Having made this pleasant discovery he quickened
speed. He did not know whether the girl had stopped laughing and had
gone into the house again, but he knew th