It was later in the day, and the zest for Shakespeare had waned. Virginia had moved from beside the fire and was sitting nearer the window, in order to get what light there was from the sun just disappearing behind the opposite hills. She was very busy with some crochet edging she had lately started. It was the first time within the memory of living woman that Virginia had been seen with a crochet-hook in her hand—fancy-work had never been her strong point—hence the inordinate pride with which she patted out the short fragment on any available surface at frequent intervals, surveying it from different points of view with her head cricked at various angles, and calling upon all and sundry to admire.

After moving nearer the window she again patted out the seven small scallops on her knee, as usual, and then became meditative. No one paid much attention to her, however. I was sitting on the settle, with a heaped-up table before me, absorbed in MSS., which I was reading, and then sorting into various piles—for printer, for reserve, for return—and arranging these on the seat beside me; important work, which accounted for my preoccupation.

Ursula was busily engaged in the laudable endeavour to construct a pair of child’s knickers out of two pairs of stocking legs. Someone had told her this could be done. It had appealed to her as a serviceable way to use up done-with stockings (and she assured me the problem of what to do with these “done-withs” had been a long-standing mental burden), while at the same time one might be conferring a benefit upon the poor. The fact that the modern “poor” would have scorned anything so economical did not worry her.

At last Virginia broke the silence. “It’s really quite remarkable! I don’t know that I’ve met with a more extraordinary crochet pattern than this,” she said thoughtfully.

“Where did you get it from?” I asked rather absently, as I went on with my work.

“From one of the magazines you are supposed to edit,” she said blandly.

“What is there extraordinary about it?” I inquired, now thoroughly roused up to give the matter all my attention, while Ursula laid down the dislocated stocking leg she had been wrestling with.

“Well, it’s like this. There is the pattern, you see,” pointing to a picture I had seen before, “and there are the directions. When you’ve worked them through once, that makes one scallop. Do you see?”

We said we saw it quite plainly.

“Then, you notice it says at the very end, ‘go back and repeat from the first row’? Now this is the extraordinary part of the affair; every time I go back and repeat from the first row it makes an entirely different scallop. The last time but one, you see, the scallop came on the opposite side of the sewing-on edge; I thought that was interesting enough! But now I find this last scallop has turned a corner. Funny, isn’t it?”

For the first time we gave Virginia’s bit of edging serious attention. What she had done with those directions it was impossible to say, but the result was certainly peculiar.

“That will be a valuable piece of lace by the time it’s finished,” I said. “What are you going to do with it?”

“I’m making it as a Christmas present for you,” she replied sweetly. “I think it may help to promote conversation if you display it at your social functions. I know you’re going to say how unselfish it is of me. I think, myself, I mellow as I age.”

“Not at all,” I replied politely, and suggested that we should go for a walk, lest such concentrated thinking should be too much for her.

“If you’d been a properly-minded hostess you would have proposed that long ago. I’ve been waiting anxiously for it, only there is Ursula absorbed in that outfit that no masculine infant anywhere would recognise——”

“Oh, I’ve given up the knicker idea long ago,” interrupted Ursula. “I’ve turned them into chest-protectors for the old people in the infirmary. And now, as a war economy, I’m going to enlarge your vests (I neither ask for, nor expect, gratitude!). The laundry having shrunk them to waistbands, I shall add an upper and a lower storey.”

“—and you sit hour after hour reading MSS. What are they all about? What’s that one in your hand, for instance?”

“This one,” holding up some sheets of violently-written paper that almost burst through the envelope, “is an anonymous letter from some irate lady who objects to something or someone appearing in our pages. I haven’t time to read it, but if you care to wade through it——”

“Anonymous letters are so futile.”

“Anything but,” I told her. “It is always a pleasant thing, at the end of the day, to feel that you have, even in a slight way, contributed to anyone’s happiness. And I’m sure the lady who dug her pen into that anonymous letter was very happy when she posted it. Glad am I, therefore, to be the unworthy instrument permitted to promote her joy!”

Virginia merely snorted. “What’s the next MS. about?”

“This is a very long poem on the War, and the writer explains that she has made all the lines run straight on in order to save paper, but doubtless I can find out where it rhymes. It begins ‘Hail, proud mother of nations who dwell in these sea-girt islands for centuries past and centuries yet to be——’”

Virginia said she’d skip the rest, please, and wasn’t there a little light fiction anywhere in the chaos before me?

“This is a story of a beautiful Russian princess who was doomed to live in a lonely castle, with no one but her aged and decrepit nurse, in the very centre of a pathless Siberian forest, hundreds of miles from everybody, until the spell should be broken——”

“What spell?” inquired Ursula.

“(I don’t know—the writer doesn’t say)—until the spell should be broken, when she would be free. She was the most exquisite vision that ever burst upon human sight. Not only were her features perfect, and her hair a rippling cascade of gold, but her dress was grace and beauty combined.”

“Then it wasn’t one of this season’s models!” ejaculated Ursula, “hence it must have been out-of-date. All the same, I’d like to know who was her dressmaker. Did they think to mention the name?”

(“No, that is not stated.)—She used to spend her days listening to the wolves who congregated all around the castle howling and gnashing their horrid fangs, till one day an honest, sturdy forester approached, and with one fell swoop slew dozens of them. Whereupon the Princess Elizabeth—for such was her name—opened the door and cried, ‘Welcome, deliverer!’ and in less time than it takes me to tell you, that aged and decrepit nurse had prepared, all unaided, a sumptuous wedding banquet, while gorgeously apparelled guests arrived in battalions from nowhere. Then, just as they were about to be married, the honest, sturdy forester, no longer able to conceal his identity, confessed that he was indeed the Prince.”

“What Prince?” inquired the interrupter again.

“I don’t know, and the writer doesn’t say, and I wish you would remember, Ursula, that in the larger proportion of MSS. sent to editors it is customary for the writers to omit the essential details!”

“Then I’d just as soon go for a walk as hear any more,” she said with decision.

Whereupon we got into big coats and thick gloves and tied on our hats with motor scarfs, I don’t mean the filmy wisps one wears when motoring in the park, but those large, solid, thick, brown, woollen scarves that look as though they had been made from a horse-blanket—the sort that the West End window dresser in desperation labels “dainty!” But the air was bitingly cold, and we were so high up among the hills, that no wraps would have been too warm that day. Then we started off, after I had said a final word to Eileen about the necessity for keeping the kettle boiling, as we shouldn’t be gone long. She had assured me many times already that she wasn’t the least bit nervous about being left alone—rather liked it, in fact. She was blissfully engaged at the moment in trying to construct a “dainty evening camisole” (as per some penny weekly she had bought coming down) out of the satin ribbon and lace from Virginia’s last year’s hat.

The small white dog with the brown ears accompanied us to the gate, but decided that, with the thermometer just where it was at that moment, home-keeping hearts were happiest; so he promptly returned to the hearthrug.

The sun had disappeared, but there was still light on the hill-tops, though the valley below was fast settling down to darkness. Virginia suggested the lantern, but I thought we should not need it, more especially as a moon was due immediately. So we set off at a swinging pace.

Already, owing to the severity of the frost, the roads rang like iron to our tread. Every stalk and twig was glistening with rime and feathered with hoar-frost. No sign of life did we see in all that walk. Where were the birds, and squirrels, and rabbits, and pheasants, and all the hundreds of timid wild things we were accustomed to meet on our summer rambles? We hoped they were safely tucked away in barns or burrows, or sleeping in warm hayricks, for nothing else above ground would give them any shelter. I thought of the row of twittering swallows that always perch themselves along the ridge of the cottage roof on hot summer afternoons, and felt glad they had gone off to a warmer climate.

But for ourselves, we would not have exchanged the weather that moment for any other, no matter how balmy. There is something remarkably exhilarating in the clear cold air of such a day on the hilltops, and as we mounted up and up our spirits rose with us—even though the roads were rough and terribly hard on war-time leather.

I once remarked to a local resident that I found our stony hillside roads a bit trying, to say nothing of the side paths.

“Well now, I do be s’prised to hear ’ee a-say that,” he replied. “For the on’y time I were up to Lunnon—I went for a day scursion—d’you know my legs did that hake when I got back, I were a week getting over it. It were all along o’ they flat stones what they do have up there; why, if you believe me, I was a-near toppling over every other minute. There weren’t ne’er a blessed thing to catch holt onter with your toes! I felt as though the pavemint was a-coming up to knock my head. Now on these here roads o’ ourn you can’t slip far, because there’s always summat of a rock or big stone to trip up agin.”

For myself, however, I sometimes think I would prefer the said rocks and stones if they were boiled a bit, and then mangled.

At last we reached the crest of the hill, and paused to get our breath. The silence was awe-inspiring. At all other times there is a persistent hum of insects, or cheep of birds, or the rustling of leaves and swaying grasses—movement and sound somewhere, night as well as day. But when the earth has been swept by the magic of frost, then there is silence indeed. From where we stood, we might have been alone on the very edge of the world. No house was visible, and although we knew that the little village lay in the valley below us, we could see nothing of it.

All was grey, merging into indigo in the depths of the coombes. Grey were the trees on the farther hills, grey unrelieved by the lights and shadows that gaily chase each other over the steeps in sunny weather, as the white clouds sail across the sky above them.

Near at hand the trees took on more individuality. The straight columns of the larches were mysterious-looking and awe-inspiring, suggesting regiments of soldiers suddenly called to a halt. Pale grey beeches, that in damp weather show a vivid emerald green down the north side of their huge trunks, where moss flourishes undisturbed, were now stretching out strong bare arms over the carpet of many years’ leaves lying thickly beneath them. Silver birch stems gleamed in contrast to the glossy dark green of innumerable aged yews that dotted the woods—ancient inhabitants, indeed, standing hoary and heroic like some dark-visaged guardians of the forest, among a host of newcomers of a far younger generation.

But while we were standing there, a sound suddenly broke the stillness, a sound I have heard hundreds of times on those hills, yet never without an eerie feeling. It begins far away, a low undertone murmur; gradually it comes nearer and nearer, getting louder and louder, till it becomes almost a roar, and then—diminuendo—it passes on and is finally lost in the far distance.

It is only the wind as it suddenly rushes through the river gorge; but as it tears at the forests on the hillsides, and lashes the branches together, it produces a strangely uncanny sound, more especially when the trees are bare and extremely vibrant.

Hearing this, one can understand the origin of the old-time legends about headless horsemen galloping past on windy nights, and similar hair-raising stories. As a child, when I often visited at another house in this region (for four generations of us have climbed these hills and explored the valleys), I heard these same “headless horsemen” gallop along the slopes on many stormy nights; and despite my years and my common sense, I still feel the same creepy shiver in the back of my neck when they have a particularly mad stampede past my cottage door, for then they always pause to give the weirdest of howls through the keyholes!

“How dark it is getting!” exclaimed Ursula. “Where is your moon? And just hear the wind coming up the valley!”

It had not reached us as yet, but the words had scarcely left her lips before it came—swish—full upon us. We had to grip each other and plant our walking-sticks firmly on the ground to keep our feet. And then we knew what the sudden change meant, for next moment down came the snow—snow such as the town-dweller knows nothing about, for in cities there are buildings to break the force of the elements; but on these heights there is nothing to impede the fury of the storm as it gallops over the upper regions, crashing and smashing as it goes.

The snow dashed in our eyes; it got inside our coat-collars; it clogged up our hair; it swirled and “druv” (as they say locally) till it made our heads dizzy, and our eyes smarted with trying to see through the whirling mass.

Owing to our exposed position we felt the full force of the storm, and it was a difficult matter to make headway in the blinding flakes and stinging wind.

“There is a short cut through the wood, further along the road; let us get home as soon as we can,” I said, leading the way, and we staggered on against the blizzard, till we came to the wood, and plunged from the road into its recesses. But I soon found it is one thing to know the way through a dense mass of trees in bright sunshine with a path clearly defined, and quite another thing to find one’s way in the twilight, with a gale blowing in one’s teeth and every landmark obliterated by the rapidly falling snow.

We stumbled along for some time, over the rough stones and great boulders, lovely enough in summer with their coverings of ivy, moss, and fern, but very painful and cold for the shins when you tumble over them in the snow. Before long it was quite evident to me that we were merely wandering at large among the trees, and scrambling among the undergrowth of stalks and bracken, our hats catching in the hanging branches, our skirts being clutched at by the all-pervading bramble—path there was none. I had to admit I had lost my bearings, though as we were going steadily downhill, I knew we should arrive at the other side presently, as downhill was our destination. What little conversation we indulged in—beyond the usual exclamations every time we tripped over something—had to be done in shouts, so high was the wind.

In this way we tumbled on for about half an hour. Just as Virginia was confiding to me—fortissimo above the blizzard—how she wished she had been nicer to her family when she had the opportunity, and how sweet and forgiving she would have been to them all had she but known that I was going to take her out to an arctic grave, the snow ceased, the clouds broke, the moon appeared, and at the same time we cleared the wood and struck a familiar lane—“Agag’s Path” we had named it, on account of the need for walking delicately.

By way of keeping up our spirits, Ursula began to chant, to some lilting, sprightly tune, that most lugubrious poem, “Lucy Gray.”

When she got to the verse—

Virginia exclaimed, “For mercy sake, if you must wail, do wail something cheerful and lively. ‘The Boy stood on the Burning Deck,’ for instance, would warm one up a bit, instead of that other shivery thing.”

By the time we reached our gate the storm was over, though the wind was still sweeping restlessly over the hills. A dog belonging to a neighbouring farmer jumped over the garden wall. He had evidently called in the hope of getting a chance to settle a long-standing score he had against my own innocent-looking animal, who was ever a terrible fighter! We paid no attention to the dog, however, but hurried up the path, only too thankful to see the lights of home, and glad that Eileen had forgotten to pull down the dark blinds. Nevertheless, I wondered that she did not open the door so soon as she heard the gate. I put my hand on the latch, but to my surprise the door was locked! I rattled the latch and knocked. The dog whined inside and gave impatient little short barks which always mean a summons to someone to open the door and let me in. But the door remained locked.

Then Eileen’s voice within—

“Are you quite by yourselves? Has the wolf gone?”

“Open the door at once, and don’t talk nonsense,” I said firmly, trying not to sound as irritated as I felt.

“Oh, but it isn’t nonsense. I’ve seen them out there! One was there just now. And I’m not going to risk my life by opening the door if he’s there still.”

Evidently our lives were unimportant! “If you don’t open the door this very instant,” I said, “I’ll get in through the window. You must be out of your senses, and you have always professed to be so brave!”

The key grated in the lock, and the door opened half an inch, while Eileen’s nose peeped at the crack, to make sure we were not the wolf. Then she explained, “If you’d been here for hours and hours, as I have”—(we had actually been gone an hour and a half, though I could understand the sudden storm, and our delay, had made her nervous)—“hearing those wolves outside a-howling and howling and gnashing their horrid fangs, you wouldn’t wonder I was afraid to open the door. I saw one skulking off just before you came in.”

I understood the situation immediately. “Eileen,” I said severely, “what have you been reading?”

“I couldn’t help just seeing what it was all about when I spread the sheets on the dresser. You said I must have fresh papers for the dresser and shelves——”

“Fresh paper on the dresser?” I exclaimed, and went hurriedly into the kitchen. Sure enough, the dresser, the pantry and scullery shelves, and all other available surfaces, including the deep window-sill and the tops of the safes, had been carefully covered with white paper; prompt investigation proved them to be pages from some of the various MSS. I had left in piles on the settle when I went out. Of course the writing was face downwards. I lifted things and examined what was beneath. The vegetable dishes on the dresser were reposing on portions of a serial story; canisters, saltbox and biscuit-tins shared the back of one of a series of Nature Study articles; the Siberian wolves were gnashing their horrid fangs beneath the knife-machine. I left the anonymous letter to an amiable if inglorious end, laid along the saucepan shelf, but I hurriedly collected the rest to the accompaniment of Eileen’s plaintive tones—

“I thought you had put them there for waste paper. And the back of every sheet was so beautifully clean, and I had made my kitchen look so nice with them.”

All of which goes to illustrate the risk one runs in sending MSS. to editors, more especially to feminine editors possessed of kitchens.

Though the fall of snow did not last very long, the wind howled and moaned around the house all the evening, and roared in the wide chimneys like a 32-feet open diapason pedal pipe. Virginia suggested to Eileen that she should go out and put a little salt on the wolves’ tails to see if that would quiet them.

I thoroughly enjoy the moaning of the wind if I am surrounded by creature comforts—a big fire, a good cup of tea, or something interesting in that line. I never feel a desire for intellectual or introspective pursuits when the moan is most robust. When a raw nor’wester or a bullying sou’wester howls outside the door and windows, making the pine trees creak and groan like the wheels of an old timber waggon, and the evergreen firs wildly wave their branches like long dark plumes, I want to be able to hug myself to myself in the midst of warmth and good cheer, and in the company of some congenial fellow being. Then I give the fire a further poke and another log, remarking contentedly: “Just hark at the wind! What a night! Isn’t it cosy indoors!” And the brass candlesticks on the mantelpiece, and the plates and jugs and dishes on the dresser blink acquiescence.

Under such circumstances I love the howlers on these hills. But if I were a studious ascetic, burning the midnight oil—and very little else—I’m afraid that the sound of the wailing up and down the scale in minor sixths, coupled with the lack of comforting food and blazing fire and sympathetic companionship, would make me desperately melancholy indeed.

Now we were indoors we could defy the weather, and here at least firewood was plentiful—not the “five sticks a penny, take it or leave it,” that had been our portion in town, but as much as ever one wanted, and plenty more where the last came from. We soon had crackling blazes all over the house, and you should have seen Eileen’s almost awestruck countenance when she was told to make herself a fire in her own bedroom! “Now I know what it’s like to be the Queen!” she exclaimed.

I had been literally fire-starved, owing to the need for economizing on fuel in town; and now I was loose among my own woods again, with snapped branches lying in all directions among the undergrowth, I went in for an orgy of warmth. Large chunks of apple wood and stubby bits the wind had tossed down from the creaking fir-trees, made crackling glowing fires in the big open grates. An absurd butterfly unthawed itself from some crevice among the ceiling beams and came walking deliberately down the window curtain, evidently under the impression that he was in for a sultry summer.

For some time we sat and watched the splendour of it all.

When you are burning logs from old, sea-going ships, you see again the blue and saffron of the sky, and the green and peacock tints of the ocean; and in like manner you can see leaping from our forest logs the crimson and yellow and gold that once blazed in the autumn glory of the tree-covered hills, and the glow of the fire gives back the warmth and the sunshine that the trees caught in their leaves and cherished in their rugged branches.

I dropped off to sleep that night with the flickering fire-glow whispering of comfort and rest for body and brain. Yes, despite the soothing balm of it all, and the certainty of safety from “the terror that walks by night” so that one could sleep without that sense of constant listening that has become second nature with those of us who live in town, I could not enjoy it with the old-time zest. Who could, with the thought ever on one’s heart: what about this lad, and that one? where are they lying this bitter night?

Physical sense becomes numbed when one lives perpetually in the shadow of possible tragedy.

Probably it was the after-effect of our struggle with the wind and weather that caused us all to sleep very soundly that night; at any rate, it was broad daylight before anyone stirred in the cottage next morning, and we missed the doings of the storm king in the interval. When I first opened my eyes I wondered what the white light could be that was reflected on the ceiling. Then I looked out of the window, and what a scene it was! The whole earth, so far as the eye could see, was one vast fairyland of snow; moreover, the face of creation appeared to have risen three or four feet nearer the bedroom window since last I had looked out, though the full import of this did not occur to me at the moment. I could merely look and look at the wonderful transformation that had been effected so rapidly and so silently while we slept. All trace of the garden had disappeared; shrubs and trees alike were bowed down with billows of snow. In the more exposed places, the wind had blown some of the snow from the firs and larches, but for the most part the trees on the hillside were as laden with snow as those in the garden. We might have been high up in the Alps. The sun was trying to shine, and bringing a gleam and glint out of every snow crystal, but the sky still looked leaden in the north.

Eileen, bringing the morning tea, imparted the thrilling intelligence that the snow was several feet deep outside the doors, the outhouses inaccessible.

“Then we must clear the snow from the path ourselves,” I said. “There is nothing else for it.” The handy man was laid up with influenza in his home several fields away. And there was small likelihood of any other man coming our way. But the question of a few shovels of snow did not seem a serious matter; we were quite lighthearted about it.

When we made our first survey of the situation, however, we found that the snow was far higher outside the door than we had at first imagined. Owing to the position of the house, and the way it nestles back in a little hollow that has been cut out of the hillside to give it level standing room, special inducement had been offered to the snow to pile itself up in drifts and block each door in a most effectual manner. Still—that snow had to be cleared away somehow, and we stood in the doorway and discussed methods.

Hitherto I had always held the idea that people who allowed themselves to remain “snowed up” were very dull-witted and lacking in enterprise. Why not start clearing from the inside, beginning with the spadeful nearest the doorstep, and so go on clearing, space after space, until they had got through to the outer world? To me it seemed quite an easy thing to do if you went about it systematically. But one slight detail had never occurred to me, viz., what should be done with the first spadeful of snow when you shovelled it up from beside the doorstep, to say nothing of the next and the next! That was one of the questions that bothered us now, though it was not the first difficulty we encountered.

At the very outset, of course, we all said, “Just get a spade!” But, alas, the spade was locked up in one of the inaccessible outhouses! Next we called for a broom, but all brooms were in the same building. Then I said, “Well, bring some shovels.”

“Here’s the kitchen shovel,” said Eileen (Ursula pounced on that at once), “and here’s the scoop from the coal-scuttle, and here’s one of the small brass shovels from upstairs.”

“But where is the big iron shovel?” I asked.

“That’s in the coal-shed” (likewise inaccessible!). Virginia turned a deaf ear on the bedroom shovel, and possessed herself of the scoop. I had no alternative but to start work with the small brass affair that was about as effective as a fish-slice would have been!

We each shovelled up a mass (most of it tumbling off the shovel again before we got it into mid-air), and then we looked at each other and enquired what we were to do with it. It did not seem advisable to carry it inside the house; and the only alternative was to toss it a foot or two away from us; but then, that only meant adding to the pile already there, which in any case we should have to clear away before we could get anywhere! It was a problem.

In the end we managed to clear about a square foot, and make a few small burrows in the mound around us, by throwing the snow as far away as we could each time. But what was that foot! We were still yards away from the coal-shed and the wood-house, with only a limited supply indoors, and still further away from the water. We had been working for a solid hour, and seemed to have raised a haystack of snow a little way off, where we had tossed our meagre shovelfuls. And then—as though to mock our feeble attempts—down came the snow again, and covered up the space we had cleared with such effort!

We looked at it in absolute despair.

“Why was I born an unmarried spinster?” exclaimed Ursula. “Oh, that a man would hove in sight—or whatever the present tense of ‘hove’ may be.”

But no man obligingly hove in response!