all when
that squirrel jumped across to the pine?" She tilted her head, narrowing
her lids as she peered upward. "There he is! One gets used to the
light.... Look! See his little eyes shining down at us!"

As Amherst looked where she pointed, the squirrel leapt to another tree,
and they stole on after him through the hushed wood, guided by his grey
flashes in the dimness. Here and there, in a break of the snow, they
trod on a bed of wet leaves that gave out a breath of hidden life, or a
hemlock twig dashed its spicy scent into their faces. As they grew used
to the twilight their eyes began to distinguish countless delicate
gradations of tint: cold mottlings of grey-black boles against the snow,
wet russets of drifted beech-leaves, a distant network of mauve twigs
melting into the woodland haze. And in the silence just such fine
gradations of sound became audible: the soft drop of loosened
snow-lumps, a stir of startled wings, the creak of a dead branch,
somewhere far off in darkness.

They walked on, still in silence, as though they had entered the glade
of an enchanted forest and were powerless to turn back or to break the
hush with a word. They made no pretense of following the squirrel any
longer; he had flashed away to a high tree-top, from which his ironical
chatter pattered down on their unheeding ears. Amherst's sensations were
not of that highest order of happiness where mind and heart mingle their
elements in the strong draught of life: it was a languid fume that stole
through him from the cup at his lips. But after the sense of defeat and
failure which the last weeks had brought, the reaction was too exquisite
to be analyzed. All he asked of the moment was its immediate
sweetness....

They had reached the brink of a rocky glen where a little brook still
sent its thread of sound through mufflings of ice and huddled branches.
Bessy stood still a moment, bending her head to the sweet cold tinkle;
then she moved away and said slowly: "We must go back."

As they turned to retrace their steps a yellow line of light through the
tree-trunks showed them that they had not, after all, gone very deep
into the wood. A few minutes' walk would restore them to the lingering
daylight, and on the farther side of the meadow stood the sleigh which
was to carry Bessy back to Hanaford. A sudden sense of the evanescence
of the moment roused Amherst from his absorption. Before the next change
in the fading light he would be back