Hibbert, who was delicately sensitive to the least change in earth or sky, was perhaps the first to feel it.  Only he did not prophesy.  He knew through every nerve in his body that moisture had crept into the air, was accumulating, and that presently a fall would come.  For he responded to the moods of Nature like a fine barometer.

And the knowledge, this time, brought into his heart a strange little wayward emotion that was hard to account for—­a feeling of unexplained uneasiness and disquieting joy.  For behind it, woven through it rather, ran a faint exhilaration that connected remotely somewhere with that touch of delicious alarm, that tiny anticipating “dread,” that so puzzled him when he thought of his next meeting with his skating companion of the night.  It lay beyond all words, all telling, this queer relationship between the two; but somehow the girl and snow ran in a pair across his mind.

Perhaps for imaginative writing-men, more than for other workers, the smallest change of mood betrays itself at once.  His work at any rate revealed this slight shifting of emotional values in his soul.  Not that his writing suffered, but that it altered, subtly as those changes of sky or sea or landscape that come with the passing of afternoon into evening—­imperceptibly.  A subconscious excitement sought to push outwards and express itself ... and, knowing the uneven effect such moods produced in his work, he laid his pen aside and took instead to reading that he had to do.

Meanwhile the brilliance passed from the sunshine, the sky grew slowly overcast; by dusk the mountain tops came singularly close and sharp; the distant valley rose into absurdly near perspective.  The moisture increased, rapidly approaching saturation point, when it must fall in snow.  Hibbert watched and waited.

And in the morning the world lay smothered beneath its fresh white carpet.  It snowed heavily till noon, thickly, incessantly, chokingly, a foot or more; then the sky cleared, the sun came out in splendour, the wind shifted back to the east, and frost came down upon the mountains with its keenest and most biting tooth.  The drop in the temperature was tremendous, but the ski-ers were jubilant.  Next day the “running” would be fast and perfect.  Already the mass was settling, and the surface freezing into those moss-like, powdery crystals that make the ski run almost of their own accord with the faint “sishing” as of a bird’s wings through the air.

IV

That night there was excitement in the little hotel-world, first because there was a bal costume, but chiefly because the new snow had come.  And Hibbert went—­felt drawn to go; he did not go in costume, but he wanted to talk about the slopes and ski-ing with the other men, and at the same time....

Ah, there was the truth, the deeper necessity that called.  For the singular connection between the stranger and the snow again betrayed itself, utterly beyond explanation as before, but vital and insistent.  Some hidden instinct in his pagan soul—­heaven knows how he phrased it even to himself, if he phrased it at all—­whispered that with the snow the girl would be somewhere about, would emerge from her hiding place, would even look for him.