Paul had requested Catrina and Maggie to drive as quietly as possible through the forest.  The warning was unnecessary, for the stillness of snow is infectious, while the beauty of the scene seemed to command silence.  As usual, Catrina drove without bells.  The one attendant on his perch behind was a fur-clad statue of servitude and silence.  Maggie, leaning back, hidden to the eyes in her sables, had nothing to say to her companion.  The way lay through forests of pine—­trackless, motionless, virgin.  The sun, filtering through the snow-laden branches, cast a subdued golden light upon the ruddy upright trunks of the trees.  At times a willow-grouse, white as the snow, light and graceful on the wing, rose from the branch where he had been laughing to his mate with a low, cooing laugh, and fluttered away over the trees.

“A kooropatka,” said Catrina, who knew the life of the forest almost as well as Paul, whose very existence was wrapped up in these things.

Far over the summits of the pines a snipe seemed to be wheeling a sentinel round.  He followed them as they sped along, calling out all the while his deep warning note, like that of a lamb crouching beneath a hedge where the wind is not tempered.

Once or twice they heard the dismal howl of a wolf—­the most melancholy, the weirdest, the most hopeless of nature’s calls.  The whole forest seemed to be on the alert—­astir and in suspense.  The wolf, disturbed in his lair, no doubt heard and understood the cry of the watchful snipe and the sudden silence of the willow-grouse, who loves to sit and laugh when all is safe.  A clumsy capercailzie, swinging along over the trees with a great flap and rush of wings, seemed to be intent on his own solitary, majestic business—­a very king among the fowls of the air.

Amid the topmost branches of the pines the wind whispered and stirred like a child in sleep; but beneath all was still.  Every branch stood motionless beneath its burden of snow.  The air was thin, exhilarating, brilliant—­like dry champagne.  It seemed to send the blood coursing through the veins with a very joy of life.

Catrina noted all these things while cleverly handling her ponies.  They spoke to her with a thousand voices.  She had roamed in these same forests with Paul, who loved them and understood them as she did.

Maggie, in the midst as it were of a revelation, leaned back and wondered at it all.  She, too, was thinking of Paul, the owner of these boundless forests.  She understood him better now.  This drive had revealed to her a part of his nature which had rather puzzled her—­a large, simple, quiet strength which had developed and grown to maturity beneath these trees.  We are all part of what we have seen.  We all carry with us through life somewhat of the scenes through which we passed in childhood.

Maggie knew now where Paul had learnt the quiet concentration of mind, the absorption in his own affairs, the complete lack of interest in the business of his neighbor which made him different from other men.  He had learnt these things at first hand from God’s creatures.  These forest-dwellers of fur and feather went about their affairs in the same absorbed way, with the same complete faith, the same desire to leave and be left alone.  The simplicity of Nature was his.  His only craft was forest craft.