The next evening, I went to her bower to tell her of the matter, but she was not there.  Then the snow began to fall, and still I clambered up the cliff, and waited at the end of the valley every hour of the day and far into the night.  But no light footstep came to meet me, and no sweet voice was in the air.  At last I resolved upon a desperate and difficult enterprise, for I was well-nigh mad with anxiety.  I would go to Lorna’s house, and find out at all costs what had befallen her.  But though I knew fairly well where her house was in Doone village, I was perplexed how to get there.  I could not even get to her bower; for in the night a great snow-storm broke over the country—­the worst since 1625.  Our farm was drifted up, and in some places the snow was thirty and fifty feet deep.  Travel of any sort seemed impossible.  But my elder sister, Lizzie, whom I looked down on because she was always reading books instead of helping my mother as Annie did, came to my help.  She had a wonderful lot of book learning—­much more than I ever got, though father had sent me to the famous grammar school at Tiverton founded by Master Blundell.  She now showed me how to make some strange contrivances called snowshoes, which men use in very cold countries.  Having learnt how to glide about in them, I set off to find Lorna.

By good fortune, when I got to Glen Doone, where the waterfall had frozen into rough steps, easy to climb, the snow came on again, thick enough to blind a man who had not spent his time among it as I had for days and days.  The weather drove all the Doones indoors, and I found Lorna’s house almost drifted up like our farm, but got at last to the door and knocked.  I was not sure but that the answer might not be the mouth of a carbine; but Gwenny Carfax, a little Cornish maid attached to my Lorna, opened it, and said when she saw me: 

“Master Ridd!  I wish you was good to eat.  Us be shut in here and starving.”

The look of wolfish hunger in her eyes frightened me, and I strode in and found Lorna fainting for want of food.  Happily, I had a good loaf of bread and a large mince pie, which I had brought in case I had to bide out all night.  When Lorna and her maid had eaten these, I heard the tale of their sufferings.  Sir Ensor Doone was dead, and Carver Doone was now the leader; and he was trying to starve Lorna into agreeing to marry him.

“If I warrant to bring you safe and sound to our farm, Lorna, will you come with me?” I said.

“To be sure I will, dear,” said my darling.  “I must either starve or go with you, John.”

Our plans were soon made.  I went home with the utmost speed, and got out our light pony-sled and dragged it to the top of the waterfall near my darling’s bower.  It was well I returned quickly.  When I entered Lorna’s house I saw, by the moonlight flowing in, a sight which drove me beyond sense.  Lorna was crouching behind a chair in utter terror, and a drunken Doone was trying to draw the chair away.  I bore him out of the house as lightly as I would a baby, but I squeezed his throat a little more than I would an infant’s; then I pitched him into a snow-drift, and he did not move.