He stood there staring out forlornly at the misty sea of shifting whiteness.  It chilled him to the bone.  It seemed to him that the pillars of the sky had collapsed and the dust of the moon and stars was falling.  Soon everything would be buried and the world itself would be no more.  He looked at the calendar which he had scratched upon the wall.  It was the twenty-fourth day of December.  He wondered whether God knew what was happening and whether He had planned it.  Then he gave up wondering, for behind him, from the blackness of the cave, the Woman called.

“Oh, Man,” she cried, “I cannot bear this any longer!”

He groped his way to her and raised her in his arms so that her head lay on his breast.  Even in the darkness he could see the glow of her hair, like the shadow of flame growing fainter and fainter.

“My Woman,” he whispered, “what can I do for you?” And again he whispered, “What can I do for you?”

She pressed her face close to his before she answered, petting him the way she had been used to do in Eden.  “Do for me?  Nothing.  You’ve tried with your remedies—­you’ve tried so hard.  Poor you!  If we could only find God——­”

“If we could,” the Man said, “but——­”

And then they both grew silent, for how could they find God when He had climbed back to Heaven, destroying the sky-blue stairs behind Him?

“Perhaps, He still walks in Eden.”  It was the Woman who had spoken.  “If you were to go and watch through the bars of Eden till He comes and were to call to Him—­if you were to tell Him that I cannot bear it any longer and that we’re sorry, so sorry—­that we did it in our ignorance——­” Without ending what she was saying, she fell to sobbing.

He didn’t dare to tell her that the moon and stars were falling and that the gates of Eden were blotted out.  From where she lay in the blackness of the cave she could see nothing; she was too weak even to crawl to the entrance.  As he did his best to comfort her, “If we could only again find God——­” she kept whispering.

So at last, having ordered the dog to guard her, the Man departed on his hopeless errand.  It was brave of him.  He believed that in trying to find God, he would get so lost that he would never be able to retrace his footsteps.  Before he went he kissed the Woman tenderly, begging forgiveness for all the misery he had caused her.

“But I caused it, too,” she confessed.  “It wasn’t your rib that was to blame.  It wasn’t you at all.  I wanted the fruit and we ate it together.”

It was the first time she had acknowledged it; until then she had insisted that the fault was his solely.  So in the moment of farewell she restored to him one little ray of the great, lost sun of flaming happiness.

VI

The air was so thick with falling snow that he was well-nigh stifled.  His eyes were blinded as though they were padded with cottonwool.  The flakes brushed against his cheeks like live things.  At his sixth step from the entrance he had lost his direction.  His feet commenced to slide; against his will he went avalanching and cavorting down the path.