Daylight was in the room.  The girl had knelt at first upright; then, as her passion seemed to avail nothing, but only to weary her, she sank back, sitting on her feet, buried her locked hands deeply in her lap, and with head bowed over them, continued to stab the air with short, almost inaudible, complaints.  The dead man lay still.  The dog, after standing long in subdued silence, came and with his tongue softly lapped some of the snow-water from her hair.

After that, she got up and went with him back into the kitchen, and lit the fire, and cooked food, and the day waned.

There is never in Nature that purpose to thwart which man in his peevishness is apt to attribute to her.  Just because he desired so much that the winter should hold off a few days longer, Bates, on seeing the snow falling from the white opaque sky, took for granted that the downfall would continue and the ice upon the lake increase.  Instead of that, the snow stopped falling at twilight without apparent cause, and night set in more mildly.

Darkness fell upon the place, as darkness can only fall upon solitudes, with a lonesome dreariness that seemed to touch and press.  Night is not always dark, but with this night came darkness.  There was no star nor glimmer of light; the pine-clad hills ceased to have form; the water in the lake was lost to all sense but that of hearing; and upon nearer objects the thinly sprinkled snow bestowed no distinctness of outline, but only a weird show of whitish shapes.  The water gave forth fitful sobs.  At intervals there were sounds round the house, as of stealthy feet, or of quick pattering feet, or of trailing garments—­this was the wind busy among the drifting leaves.

The two men, who had finished the coffin by the light of a lantern, carried it into the house and set it up against the wall while they ate their evening meal.  Then they took it to a table in the next room to put the dead man in it.  The girl and the dog went with them.  They had cushioned the box with coarse sacking filled with fragrant pine tassels, but the girl took a thickly quilted cloth from her own bed and lined it more carefully.  They did not hinder her.

“We’ve made it a bit too big,” said Saul; “that’ll stop the shaking.”

The corpse, according to American custom, was dressed in its clothes—­a suit of light grey homespun, such as is to be bought everywhere from French-Canadian weavers.  When they had lifted the body and put it in the box, they stopped involuntarily to look, before the girl laid a handkerchief upon the face.  There lay a stalwart, grey-haired man—­dead.  Perhaps he had sinned deeply in his life; perhaps he had lived as nobly as his place and knowledge would permit—­they could not tell.  Probably they each estimated what they knew of his life from a different standpoint.  The face was as ashen as the grey hair about it, as the grey clothes the body wore.  They stood and looked at it—­those three, who were bound to each other by no tie except such as the accident of time and place had wrought.  The dog, who understood what death was, exhibited no excitement, no curiosity; his tail drooped; he moaned quietly against the coffin.