ng in the outward roll like the mast of a
phantom-craft; everywhere inshore clusters of ruddy-cheeked boys race
headlong with their hawkey-sticks, and with their wild cries, making
benders where the ice surges in a long swell: and constantly in
Beltran's wake slips Vivia, a scarlet shadow, while a clumsy little
black outline is ever designing itself at her heels as Ray strives in
vain to perfect the mysteries of the left stroke. All about, the keen
air breathes its exhilaration, and the glow seems to penetrate the pores
till the very blood dances along filled with such intoxicating
influence; all above, the afternoon heaven deepens till it has no hidden
richness, and between one and the pale gold of the coldly reddening
horizon the white air seems hollow as the flaw in some great transparent
jewel. Still they wind away in their gladness, when hurriedly Beltran
reaches his hand for the heedless Vivia's, and hurriedly she sees
terrifying grooves spreading round them, a great web-work of
cracks,--the awful ice lifts itself, sinks, and out of a monstrous
fissure chill death rises to meet them and ingulf them. In an instant,
Ray, who might have escaped, has hurled himself upon them, and then, as
they all struggle for one drowning breath in the flood, Vivia dimly
divines through her horror an arm stretched first towards Ray, snatched
back again, and bearing her to safety. Ray has already scrambled from
the shallow breach where his brother alone found bottom; waiting hands
assist Beltran; but as she lingers that moment shivering on the brink,
blindly remembering the double movement of that arm beneath the ice, she
silently asks, with a thrill, if he suffered Ray to save himself because
he was a boy, and could, or because--because she was Vivia!

Southern noontide, winter twilight lost themselves again, as Vivia
gazed, in the soft starry gleam of an April midnight. A quiet room,
dimly lighted by a flame that dying eyes no longer see; two figures
kneeling, one at either side of the mother,--the little apple-blossom of
a mother brought up to die among her own people,--one shaking with his
storm of sobs, the other supporting the dear, weary head on his strong
breast, and stifling his very heart-beat lest it stir the frail life too
roughly. And the mother lifts the lids of her faint eyes, as when a
parting vapor reveals rifts of serene heaven, gazes for a moment into
the depths of her first-born's tenderness, gropes darkly for his f