fine boy!"

"I'm ready," I said.

When we took the road the mare was limping. But she seemed to work out
the stiffness in her knees and after a mile or so of the hard going she
was moving smoothly enough. We made good time.

The day, as often happens after a storm, was full of blinding sunlight.
The glare of the sun upon the snow was almost unbearable. I kept my eyes
all but closed but there was so much beauty abroad in the land that I
could not bear to close them altogether. The snow clung to twigs and to
fences and to wires, and a thousand flames glinted from every crystal
when the sun struck down upon the drifts. The pine wood upon the eastern
slope of Rayborn Hill was a checkerboard of rich colour. Green and blue
and black and white, indescribably brilliant. When we crossed the bridge
at the foot of the hill we could hear the brook playing beneath the ice
that sheathed it. On the white pages of the snow wild things had writ
here and there the fine-traced tale of their morning's adventuring. We
saw once where a fox had pinned a big snowshoe rabbit in a drift.

Hazen talked much of that child of his on the homeward way. I said
little. From the top of the Rayborn Hill we sighted his house and he
laid the whip along the mare and we went down that last long descent at
a speed that left me breathless. I shut my eyes and huddled low in the
robes for protection against the bitter wind, and I did not open them
again till we turned into Hazen's barnyard, ploughing through the
unpacked snow.

When we stopped Hazen laughed.