With its dim depths for a background, she shone on it, as brilliant and distinct from it as a flashing jewel on the breast of a nun.  Her crimson frock caught a deeper warmth from the firelight, her black hair shone like a bird’s wing, the jewels on her fingers sent out sparkles of light and flame.  As Saint Harry continued to gaze at her the forest with all its haunting, dreaming witchery vanished, the high invitation of the mountains, “Come ye apart,” ceased to echo in his ears.  The world environed, encompassed her; he seemed to discern the yearning of her spirit for it, the airy rush of her winged feet toward it; and yet her eyes, those eyes which sometimes held the look of having gazed for ages on time’s mutations, were turned toward the desert.  Then Seagreave’s moment of vision passed and he turned to Hugh with an odd sinking of the heart.

Hugh had ceased to play and sat silent now on his piano stool with that motionless, concentrated air of his, as if listening to something afar.

“Hughie,” said Seagreave softly, “what are you and your sister, anyway?”

Hugh laughed and, leaning his elbow on the keys, rested his cheek on his palm.  “I am a little brother of the wind,” he said.  “I was just listening to it singing to me out there; and Pearl, well, Pearl is a daughter of fire.”

“What is it that you hear that I don’t?” asked Harry.  “I listen to the wind, too, sometimes for hours, up there in my cabin; but it’s only a falling, sighing thing to me, sometimes a rising, shrieking one.  What is this gift of music?”

“I don’t know,” said Hugh simply, “but if you will wait a moment, I will play you the song the wind is singing through the pines to-night.  It is just a little, sad one.”

Again he sat immobile, listening for a while and then began to play so plaintive and wistful a melody that Harry felt the old sorrow wake and stir within his heart and demand a reckoning of the forgetful years.  Not realizing that he did so, he arose and began to pace up and down the room, nor remembered where he was until he looked up to see Pearl watching him, surprise and even a slight curiosity upon her face.

“Forgive me,” he said, stopping before her, “for walking up and down that way as if I were in my own cabin, but something in Hugh’s music set me to dreaming.”

“You didn’t look as if they were happy dreams,” she said.

“Didn’t I?” he spoke as lightly as he could; then he changed the subject.  “Do you know that the crust on the snow is thicker than it has been yet?  How would you like to go out on your snow-shoes to-morrow morning?”

She looked her pleasure.  “That will be fine,” she cried eagerly.

She was up betimes the next day, anxious to see whether more snow had fallen during the night; but none had.  To her joy, it was one of those brilliant mornings when the sky seems a dome of sapphire sparkles, and the crust of the snow with the sun on it is like white star-dust overlaid with gold.  The radiance would have been unbearable had not the bare, black trees veiled the sky with their network of branches and twigs and the pines softened the snow with their shadows.