About two miles after the turn of the road the more thickly set habitations ceased, and there were only isolated farm-houses, with long, sloping reaches of woods and pasture-lands between.  The pasture-lands were hummocked with ice-coated rocks and hooped with frozen vines; they seemed to flow down in glittering waves, like glaciers, over the hill-sides.  The woods stood white and petrified, as woods might have done in a glacial era.  There was no sound in them except now and then the crack of a bough under the weight of ice, and slow, painful responses, like the twangs of rusty harp-strings, to the harder gusts of wind.  The cold was so intense that the ice did not melt in the noonday sun, and there were no soft droppings and gurglings to modify this rigor of white light and sound.  Occasionally a rabbit crossed Madelon’s path, silent as a little gray scudding shadow, and so swiftly that he did not reach one’s consciousness until he was out of sight.  There was seldom a winter bird, even, in sight.  The ice on the trees and the pastures had locked and sealed their larders.  Their little beaks could not pierce it for seeds and grubs, and so they were forced to repair to kitchen doors and barnyards in quest of stray crumbs from the provender of men and cattle.

The rabbits, and an ox-team drawing a sled laden with cedar logs, slipping with shrill, long squeaks over the white road, driven by a man with a red face in an ambush of frozen beard, were all the living things she met for the first four miles.  The man clambered stiffly down from his sled just before he met her, and began walking, stamping, rubbing his ears, and swinging his arms violently the while.  He stared hard at Madelon, and gave a sort of grunt as he passed.  It was an instinctive note of comradeship with another in a situation hard for their common humanity.  The man, toiling painfully along that hard road, on that bitter day, with hands and feet half frost-bitten, and face smarting as if with fire, his aching lungs straining with the icy air, felt that he and the woman struggling over the same road had common cause for wrath against this stress of nature, and so made that half-surly, half-sympathetic grunt as he passed her.  But she did not respond.  She did not even glance at him as she went along.  Her face glowed all over, red as a rose with the freezing wind; she wrapped her cloak instinctively tight around her, and walked a little stiffly, as if her feet might be somewhat numb; but there was in her fixed dark eyes no recognition of anything but some end she had in view beyond his ken.

The man stopped and looked seriously after her, and past her down the road.  “Wonder what she’s up to!” he muttered.  Then he struggled on after his oxen, who plodded along with goat’s-beards of their frozen breath hanging from their jaws.

Two miles farther on there was a sudden loud blast of a horn, and following upon it a great jangle of bells and the tramp of hoofs, and Madelon knew the Ware and Kingston stage was coming.  Presently the top of the coach and the leaders’ heads appeared above the rise of the road, and Madelon stood well aside to meet it, pressing in among the crackling icy bushes.