Dickie’s own fashion she fumbled for a simile.  But there was no word.  She thought of a star, that morning star he had drawn her over to look at from the window of her sitting-room.  Perhaps the artist in Sylvester had expressed itself in this son he so despised; perhaps Dickie was, after all, Hudson’s great work ...  All sorts of meanings and symbols pelted Sheila’s brain as she sat there, exciting and fevering her nerves.

In three days Hilliard would be coming back.  His warm youth would again fill the house, pour itself over her heart.  After the silence, his voice would be terribly persuasive, after the loneliness, his eager, golden eyes would be terribly compelling!  He was going to “fetch the parson” ...  Sheila actually wrung her hands.  Only three days for this decision and, without a decision, that awful, helpless wandering, those dangers, those rash confidences of hers.  “O God, where are you?  Why don’t you help me now?” That was Sheila’s prayer.  It gave her little comfort, but she did fall asleep from the mental exhaustion to which it brought at least the relief of expression.

When she woke, she found the world a horrible confusion of storm.  It could hardly be called morning—­a heavy, flying darkness of drift, a wind filled with icy edges that stung the face and cut the eyes, a wind with the voice of a driven saw.  The little cabin was caught in the whirling heart of a snow spout twenty feet high.  The firs bent and groaned.  There is a storm-fear, one of the inherited instinctive fears.  Sheila’s little face looked out of the whipped windows with a pinched and shrinking stare.  She went from window to hearth, looking and listening, all day.  A drift was blown in under the door and hardly melted for all the blazing fire.  That night she couldn’t go to bed.  She wrapped herself in blankets and curled herself up in the chair, nodding and starting in the circle of the firelight.

For three terrible days the world was lost in snow.  Before the end of that time Sheila was talking to herself and glad of the sound of her own hurried little voice.  Then, like God, came a beautiful stillness and the sun.  She opened the door on the fourth morning and saw, above the fresh, soft, ascending dazzle of the drift, a sky that laughed in azure, the green, snow-laden firs, a white and purple peak.  She spread out her hands to feel the sun and found it warm.  She held it like a friendly hand.  She forced herself that day to shovel, to sweep, even to eat.  Perhaps Cosme would be back before night.  He and the parson would have waited for the storm to be over before they made their start.  She believed in her own excuses for five uneasy days, and then she believed in the worst of all her fears.  She had a hundred to choose from—­Cosme’s desertion, Cosme’s death....  One day she spent walking to and fro with her nails driven into her palms.

* * * * *

Late that night the white world dipped into the still influence of a full white moon.  Before Hilliard’s cabin the great firs caught the light with a deepening flush of green, their shadows fell in even lavender tracery delicate and soft across the snow, across the drifted roof.  The smoke from the half-buried chimney turned to a moving silver plume across the blue of the winter night sky—­intense and warm as though it reflected an August lake.