rather than executed, and was perhaps the more effective for its
sketchiness.

"Yes, it's really beautiful," Miss Macroyd owned, and though she did not
join her cries to those of the other girls, who stood scattered about
admiring it, and laughing and chattering with the men whose applause,
of course, took the jocose form, there was no doubt but she admired it.
"What I can't understand is how Mrs. Westangle got the notion of this.
There's the soprano note in it, and some woman must have given it to
her."

"Not contralto, possibly?" Verrian asked.

"I insist upon the soprano," she said.

But he did not notice what she said. His eyes were following a figure
which seemed to be escaping up through the birches behind the snow castle
and ploughing its way through the drifts; in front of the structure they
had been levelled to make an easier battle-field. He knew that it was
Miss Shirley, and he inferred that she had been in the castle directing
the farm--hands building it, and now, being caught by the premature
arrival of the contesting forces, had fled before them and left her
subordinates to finish the work. He felt, with a throe of helpless
sympathy, that she was undertaking too much. It was hazardous enough to
attempt the practice of her novel profession under the best of
circumstances, but to keep herself in abeyance so far as not to be known
at all in it, and, at the same time, to give way to her interest in it to
the extent of coming out, with her infirmly established health, into that
wintry weather, and superintending the preparations for the first folly
she had planned, was a risk altogether too great for her.