THE days went, shortening. She kept to her couch through all but those hours when the sun was high. Then she lay to be warmed in the open while the year died before her. She could not see another year. She must read all her meanings into this one. September went and October waned. The sky was often overcast. They had ceased to talk of her going back. Her brother reminded her cheerfully that he had half expected a long stay for her. She must be patient. She spoke in his own vein of hopefulness, promising patience, and smiled as ever on her pair, who still wandered in that garden, bantering comrades, tasting the fruit of every tree but one.

And one day she knew that all her imaginings about this pair had been vain, caught it in the deepened look of Ewing as he turned from Virginia to herself. It was a thing to bask in—that look—like the fervid sun itself. But it hurt her, too; made it harder to let go of life. Yet always before her was the face of Kitty Teevan with its beseeching eyes: "You have so little time to live, and I must live in his memory always!" And so she put the thing away, letting him think as he must, wincing under his look of pity, and that devouring thing that lurked always back of his pity, and striving for lightness when she talked with him.

"I understand why our land seemed unreal to you," she said to him while they loitered in the blue dusk of the pine woods near the cabin one day. The peaks beyond were misty behind gray clouds that lay sullenly along the horizon. "I understand why you called our land a stage land, for this is unreal to me, painted, theatrical, impossible. I keep hearing the person who's seen the play telling his neighbor what's to come next."

"It's real enough," he answered, looking away from her. "I have a way of telling when a land is real."

"You have?"

"Any land is real where you are. New England or Colorado or Siberia or——"

"There, there!" she soothed him mockingly—"or India's coral strand. That's quite enough. You have learned your geography lesson. What a busy traveler you must have been!"

"And no land can be real where you are not," he went on gravely. "I go where you go, follow you around the world and out into the stars beyond the moon, up and down and on forever, and it all seems real to me—all except you."

"Oh, I—I'm real, real enough, but this land is a sad, fearful, threatening land, so heartless." She shivered. "Let us go in!"

"That's only because it's closing up now for the winter; that's why the sky is sorry. The leaves are nearly gone, and the fat old bears are slouching down from the high places to curl up in the holes, and the deer are moving down into the valleys, and pretty soon the hills will crawl under white blankets and go to sleep. And we shall have to do the same. We shall be shut in before you know it, snowed in, frozen in, like the bears. But the winter—it can't take you from me.""There, there!" But she could not finish. She flashed a helpless smile at him and fled indoors. He went after her, crying that winter was upon them.

And then, all in a day and a night, winter came. The wind fell to an ominous hush one midday, and a leaden quiet lay over the hills. Blurred masses of cloud rose slowly above the peaks, shaping themselves with ponderous sloth. Below these a white mist formed. Then one tiny snow crystal fell. It was followed presently by another, and then by more, floating down with unhurried ease. Meaningless wisps they seemed, fugitive bits of wool, perhaps, from a sheep losing its fleece in some nearby shearing pen. More of them came with the same slow, loitering grace, as if they would lull suspicion of the fury they heralded.

By night the storm had shut off the hills so that the cabin might have been set in a plain, for all the eye could see. The flakes no longer came saunteringly, but swiftly now, in a slant of honest fervor, frankly threatening.

By morning the land was muffled in white. The sun shone pale and cold through the mist, and the wind began a game with its new plaything, still light and dry, and quick to dance to any piping. Spruce and hemlock seemed to have darkened their green, and their arms drooped wearily under the white burdens they bore. The second day's fall buried their lowest branches so that not even the circle of bare earth was left about them.

Inside the cabin they sought the peace of the earth under its cover, the trustful repose of the live things sleeping there. The days sped by almost unmarked. Scarcely ever were they certain of the day of week or month, especially after Ben forgot to mark his calendar on the days he and Ewing devoted to getting deer for their winter's meat. There were but opinions as to the date after that.

Ben, after his work with the stock each morning, hibernated gracefully in a chair by the kitchen stove, sleeping with excited groans, like a dreaming dog. Or, awake, he stared at the wall with dulled eyes. At times he would touch his guitar to life and sing very softly, or hold it affectionately in his lap, a hand muting its strings, while he pondered dreamily of far-off matters, of cities and men, and the folly of expecting ever to receive treasure such as the advertisements promise.

Ewing and Virginia, after the snow packed, went forth on snowshoes far into the white silence; over open spaces so glaring that the eyes closed in defense; through ravines where once-noisy streams were stilled; and under forest arches of green where the snow was darkened to hints of blue—they agreed that Sydenham would paint it blue without condescending to hints—and where the hush was so intense that they instinctively lowered their voices. They passed long times without speech, as they would have done in a church, worshiping the still beauty about them, beauty of buttressed peak, of snow-choked caÑon, of green-roofed cathedral, of pink light at sunset on endless snow-quilted slopes.

Mrs. Laithe, too, sought the open when the sun was high, and one day in midwinter she walked as far as the lake in the path beaten by the stock. It did not occur to her then that this was no feat for a dying woman nor even on the succeeding days when this walk became her habit. It was a change for her eyes from the cabin prospect; the sun warmed her genially, despite the intense cold, and she liked the stillness, all the movements of life going on in a strange, muffled silence. This helped her to remember her own plight. Life still abounded with all its warmth and glad clashing, but she must have only eyes for it—no heart of desire. She had been so sure of this from the first that she gave but heedless smiles to the others when they told her she was better. They had always said such things.

She slept the long nights through now, seeking bed like a tired child, and waking in strange refreshment. And milk no longer appeased her hunger as it had wholly done when she arrived. The savor of baked meats was now sweet to her. She was presently walking to the lake both morning and afternoon, breathing deep of the dry air that ran fire in her veins as she absorbed it. And the flush on her face when she returned was not that of fever.

But more eloquent than these physical symptoms was a sullen current of rebellion rising slowly within her, the old fighting instinct, a lust for sheer living, a thing she had believed was long since extinct.

She did not lose her certainty of death all in a day. For weeks she was haunted merely by an unquiet suspicion. The cough still racked her night and morning, and the fever came each evening, but the old potency seemed to have gone from both. She tried to believe at first that this was one of those false rallies so common before the end.

The full, maddening realization came to her on a day when Ewing walked with her to the lake. He turned on her suddenly when they had mounted a slope, seized both her hands, and looked long into her eyes with a certain grave wonder.

"You are made new," he said at last. She trembled in a sudden panic, divining the truth of it, feeling, as he spoke, a great rush of life overwhelming her.

"You are living again, you are going to live. I knew you would live." He still gripped her hands. It was as if he had drawn her, warm and pulsing, out of all the wintry death about them. She could not face him, but released her hands and turned away. He had seen truly. She had relaxed utterly when she came, to waver unresistingly down into the cool abyss of her despair. But some indomitable brute thing had risen in her while she slept, to fight for life, and to fire her whole being with its triumph. While she had rested and waited in that luxury of self-abandonment she had been cheated of her victory—betrayed back to life.

Trying now to think what life would mean to her, she was overwhelmed with shame and dismay. With death so near things had been simple. But how could she live on and face Ewing, shaming herself and shaming him in the darkness of his belief about her?

They walked back to the cabin in silence. Ewing, too, she felt, saw the future to be less simple now.

"I shall know what to do," he said, as they reached the door; and there was again in his eyes that puzzling look of some fixed purpose. For the first time this vaguely alarmed her now, and she questioned him swiftly with her eyes. But he only pointed to his mother's portrait—they had entered the studio—and said, "Do you think I'd do less for you than I would for her?"

She could endure neither his own look nor the mother's, and fled to her room. There she studied her face in the glass. It was all true. She was going to live, and she sickened at the thought. Again it was a time for tears and laughter.