With a cry she threw herself upon her knees, beseeching the dull ears.

* * * * *

Six hours later he died, and when the rain ceased and the sun came out they buried him beside his wife in the little graveyard.  For days after the funeral Eugenia wandered like a shadow through the still rooms.  Bernard had come and gone, carrying with him his short, sharp grief.  Miss Chris had put aside her own sorrow and gone back to the management of the house; only the girl, worn, idle, tragic, haunted the reminders of her loss.  Coming upon the general’s old slouch hat on the rack, she had grasped it in sudden passionate longing; at the sight of his half-filled pipe she had rushed from the room and from the house.  The faint scent of tobacco about the furniture was a continual torture to her.  In the great chamber next the parlour she would sit for hours, staring at the cold white bed, shivering before the fireless hearth.  The place chilled her like a vault; but she would linger wretchedly until led away by Miss Chris, when she would sob upon that broad, unselfish bosom.

December passed; the unsunned earth turned itself for a winter rest.  January came, swift and changeful.  With February a snowstorm swept from the north, driving southward.  At first they felt it in the air; then the swollen clouds chased overhead; at last the white flakes arrived, falling, falling, falling.  Through the night the storm made a glistening mantle for the darkness; through the day it hid sombre sky and sombre earth in a spotless veil.  It covered the far country to the distant forests; it weighted the ancient cedars until their green branches bent to earth; it wrapped the gravelled walk in a winding sheet; it filled the hollows of the box bushes until they hardened into hills of ice.  The snow was followed by cold winds.  The ground froze in the night.  Long icicles formed on the naked trees, the window panes bore a lacework of frost.

One afternoon, when the landscape was white and hard, Eugenia went out into the deserted sheep pasture where the dead oak stood.  A winter sunset was burning like a bonfire in the west, and as far as the red horizon swept an unbroken waste of snow.  The rail fences shone silver in their coat of frost, and from the blackened tree above her pendants of ice were shot with light.  Across the field a flock of gaunt crows flew, casting purple shadows.

Eugenia leaned against the oak and stared vacantly at the landscape—­at the sunset, and at the waste of snow, across which flitted the demoniac shadows of the crows.  Her eyes saw only the desolation and the death; they were sealed to the grandeur.

A sense of her own loneliness swept over her with the loneliness of nature.  Her own isolation—­the isolation of a strong soul in pain—­walled her apart as with a wall of ice.  That assurance of human companionship on which she had based her future seemed suddenly annihilated.  She was alone and life was before her.