Migwan stood as if turned to stone.  She could hardly believe that those fair pages, which represented so many hours of patient work, had been swept away in one moment of passion.  Blindly she turned, and putting on her wraps, walked from the house without a word.  It seemed to her that Fate had decreed that nothing which she undertook should succeed.  Discouragement settled down on her like a black pall.  With the ability to do things which should set her above her fellows, she was being relentlessly pursued by some strange fatality which marked every effort of hers a failure.  She walked aimlessly up street after street without any idea where she was going, entirely oblivious to her surroundings.  Wandering thus, she discovered that she was in the park, and had come out on the high bluff of the lake.  She stood moodily looking down at the vast field of ice that such a short time before had been tossing waves.  The lake, to all appearances, was frozen solid out as far as the one-mile crib.  There was a curious stillness in the air, as when the clock had stopped, due to the absence of the noise made by the waves dashing on the rocks.  Nothing had ever appealed so to Migwan as did the absolute silence and solitude of that frozen lake.  Her bruised young spirit was weary of contact with people, and found balm in this icy desert where there was so sound of a human voice.  As far as the eye could see there was not a living being in sight.  A skating carnival in the other end of the park drew the attention of all who were abroad on this Saturday afternoon, and kept them away from the lake front.

A desire to be enveloped in this solitude came over Migwan; to get her feet off the earth altogether.  She half slid and half climbed down the cliff and walked out on the ice.  Before her the grey horizon line stretched vast and unbroken, and she walked out toward it, lost in dreaming.  Sometimes the floor under her feet was smooth and polished as a pane of glass, and sometimes it was rough and covered with hummocks where the water had frozen in the wind.  In Migwan’s fancy this was not the lake she was walking on; it was one of the great Swiss glaciers.  Those grey clouds there, standing out against the black ones, they were the mountains, and she was taking her perilous journey through the mountain pass.  The ice cracked slightly under her feet, but she did not notice.  She was a Swiss guide, taking a party of tourists across the glacier.  Underneath this floor of ice were the bodies of those travelers who had fallen into the crevices.  She was telling the tourists the stories of the famous disasters and they were shuddering at her tale.  The ice cracked again under her feet, but her mind, soaring in flights of fancy, took no heed.

Her imagination took another turn.  Now she was Mrs. Knollys, in the famous story, waiting for the body of her husband to be given up by the glacier.  The long years of waiting passed and she stood at the foot of the glacier watching the miracle unfold before her eyes.  The glacier was making queer cracking noises as it descended, and it sounded as though there was water underneath it.  She could hear it lapping.