to go faster as she realized this; but now travel had become
more difficult. There was no longer any beach. High, precipitous
bluffs, which she recognized as marking Seven Mile Point, descended
here directly to the hummocked ice along the water's edge. She fell
many times, traveling upon these hummocks; there were strange,
treacherous places between the hummocks where, except for her
snowshoes, she would have broken through. Her skirt was torn; she lost
one of her gloves and could not stop to look for it; she fell again and
sharp ice cut her ungloved hand and blood froze upon her finger tips.
She did not heed any of these things.

She was horrified to find that she was growing weak, and that her
senses were becoming confused. She mistook at times floating ice,
metallic under the moonlight, for boats; her heart beat fast then while
she scrambled part way up the bluff to gain better sight and so
ascertained her mistake. Deep ravines at places broke the shores;
following the bend of the bluffs, she got into these ravines and only
learned her error when she found that she was departing from the shore.
She had come, in all, perhaps eight miles; and she was "playing out";
other girls, she assured herself--other girls would not have weakened
like this; they would have had strength to make certain no boats were
there, or at least to get help. She had seen no houses; those, she
knew, stood back from the shore, high upon the bluffs, and were not
easy to find; but she scaled the bluff now and looked about for lights.
The country was wild and wooded, and the moonlight showed only the
white stretches of the shrouding snow.

She descended to the beach again and went on; her gaze continued to
search the lake, but now, wherever there was a break in the bluffs, she
looked toward the shore as well. At the third of these breaks, the
yellow glow of a window appeared, marking a house in a hollow between
snow-shrouded hills. She turned eagerly that way; she could go only
very slowly now. There was no path; at least, if there was, the snow
drifts hid it. Through the drifts a thicket projected; the pines on
the ravine sides overhead stood so close that only a silver tracery of
the moonlight came through; beyond the pines, birch trees, stripped of
their bark, stood black up to the white boughs.

Constance climbed over leafless briars and through brush and came upon
a clearing perhaps fifty yards across, roughly crescent shaped, as