“Oh!” Frona cried, stopping the dogs and coming up to her.  “You are hurt?  Can I help you?” she queried, though the stranger shook her head.  “But you mustn’t sit there.  It is nearly seventy below, and you’ll freeze in a few minutes.  Your cheeks are bitten already.”  She rubbed the afflicted parts vigorously with a mitten of snow, and then looked down on the warm returning glow.

“I beg pardon.”  The woman rose somewhat stiffly to her feet.  “And I thank you, but I am perfectly warm, you see” (settling the fur cape more closely about her with a snuggling movement), “and I had just sat down for the moment.”

Frona noted that she was very beautiful, and her woman’s eye roved over and took in the splendid furs, the make of the gown, and the bead-work of the moccasins which peeped from beneath.  And in view of all this, and of the fact that the face was unfamiliar, she felt an instinctive desire to shrink back.

“And I haven’t hurt myself,” the woman went on.  “Just a mood, that was all, looking out over the dreary endless white.”

“Yes,” Frona replied, mastering herself; “I can understand.  There must be much of sadness in such a landscape, only it never comes that way to me.  The sombreness and the sternness of it appeal to me, but not the sadness.”

“And that is because the lines of our lives have been laid in different places,” the other ventured, reflectively.  “It is not what the landscape is, but what we are.  If we were not, the landscape would remain, but without human significance.  That is what we invest it with.

  “’Truth is within ourselves; it takes no rise
  From outward things, whate’er you may believe.’”

Frona’s eyes brightened, and she went on to complete the passage: 

  “’There is an inmost centre in us all,
  Where truth abides in fulness; and around.’

“And—­and—­how does it go?  I have forgotten.”

  “‘Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in—­’”

The woman ceased abruptly, her voice trilling off into silvery laughter with a certain bitter reckless ring to it which made Frona inwardly shiver.  She moved as though to go back to her dogs, but the woman’s hand went out in a familiar gesture,—­twin to Frona’s own,—­which went at once to Frona’s heart.

“Stay a moment,” she said, with an undertone of pleading in the words, “and talk with me.  It is long since I have met a woman”—­she paused while her tongue wandered for the word—­“who could quote ‘Paracelsus.’  You are,—­I know you, you see,—­you are Jacob Welse’s daughter, Frona Welse, I believe.”