Courthope had struck across to the main road at right angles to the poplar avenue.  The poplars stood slim, upright, more like a stiff and regular formation of feathery seaweed growing out of a frozen ocean than like trees upon a plain.  He was nearing a grove of elm and birch which he had not seen the evening before; by the almost hidden rails of the fence there were half-buried shrubs.  So dry, so hard, so absolutely without bud or sere leaf was the interlacing outline of the trees and shrubs, that they too seemed to be some strange product of this new sort of ocean; they did not remind him of verdant glades.  Not that beauty was absent, nor charm, but the scene was strange, very strange; the domain of the laughing princess, on whom he had turned his back, was, in the daylight, more than ever an enchanted land which he could fancy to be unknown in story and until now unexplored by man.  Such ideas only came to him by snatches; the rest of him, mind and body, was summed up in a fierce determination to catch the thief and bring back his spoils.  Whether by this he would prove himself honest or guilty, he neither knew nor felt that he cared.

Gradually, as he thought less about his snow-shoes, he found that the wide lateral swing which he had been giving to his leg was unneeded.  Strange as it seemed, the large rackets did not interfere when he took an ordinary step.  Having made this pleasant discovery he quickened speed.  He did not know whether the girl had stopped laughing and had gone into the house again, but he knew that the falling snow and the branches of the trees must now hinder her from seeing him distinctly.

In a moment he was glad of this, for, becoming incautious, he fell.

Both arms, put out to save himself, were embedded to the very shoulder straight down in snow that offered no bottom to his touch; when his next impulse was to move knees and feet he found that the points of his snow-shoes were dug deep, and his toes, tied to them, held the soles of his feet in the same position.

What cursed temerity had made him confess to a criminal act in order to be allowed to come on this fool’s errand?  Fool, indeed, had he been to suppose that he could walk upon a frozen cloud without falling through!  Such were Courthope’s reflections.

By degrees he got himself up, but only by curling himself round and taking off his snow-shoes.  By degrees he got the snow-shoes put on again, and mounted out of the hole which he had made, with snow adhering to all his garments and snow melting adown his neck and wrists.  He now realised that he had spent nearly half an hour in walking not a quarter of a mile.  With this cheerless reflection as a companion he went doggedly on, choosing now the drifted main road for a path.