great hounds as high
as her own as she sat among them on the floor. With bright eyes and
knitted brows they followed the motions of pouring in the melted metal,
the lifting of the bullets from the mould, the clipping off of the
surplus lead, and the flash of the keen knife.

Outside the sad light waned; the wind sighed and sighed; the dreary
rain fell; the trees clashed their boughs dolorously together, and their
turbulence deadened the sound of galloping horses. As Dundas sat and
gazed at the girl's intent head, with its fleecy tendrils and its
massive coil, the great hounds beside her, all emblazoned by the
firelight upon the brown wall near by, with the vast fireplace at hand,
the whole less like reality than some artist's pictured fancy, he knew
naught of a sudden entrance, until she moved, breaking the spell, and
looked up to meet the displeasure in Roxby's eyes and the dark scowl on
Emory Keenan's face.

*****

That night the wind shifted to the north. Morning found the chilled
world still, ice where the water had lodged, all the trees incased in
glittering garb that followed the symmetry alike of every bough and
the tiniest twig, and made splendid the splintered remnants of the
lightning-riven. The fields were laced across from furrow to furrow, in
which the frozen water still stood gleaming, with white arabesques which
had known a more humble identity as stubble and crab-grass; the sky was
slate-colored, and from its sad tint this white splendor gained added
values of contrast. When the sun should shine abroad much of the effect
would be lost in the too dazzling glister; but the sun did not shine.

All day the gray mood held unchanged. Night was imperceptibly sifting
down upon all this whiteness, that seemed as if it would not be
obscured, as if it held within itself some property of luminosity, when
Millicent, a white apron tied over her golden head, improvising a hood,
its superfluous fulness gathered in many folds and pleats around her
neck, fichu-wise, stood beside the ice-draped fodder-stack and essayed
with half-numbed hands to insert a tallow dip into the socket of a
lantern, all incrusted and clumsy with previous drippings.

"I dun'no' whether I be a-goin' ter need this hyar consarn whilst
milkin' or no," she observed, half to herself, half to Emory, who,
chewing a straw, somewhat surlily had followed her out for a word apart.
"The dusk 'pears slow ter-night, but Spot's mighty late comin' home, an'