means least, a small black lacquer musical-box that played two
tunes, "Weel may the Keel row" and "John Peel,"--these were her
worldly possessions.

She sat there; as the day closed down, the trees were swept into the
night, the wind rose in the dark wood, the winter's moon crept pale
and cold into the sky, snow began to fall, at first thinly, then in
a storm, hiding the moon, flinging the fields and roads into a white
shining splendour; the wind died and the stars peeped between the
flakes of whirling snow.

She sat without moving, accusing her heart of hardness, of
unkindness. She seemed to herself then deserving of every
punishment. "If I had only gone to him," she thought again and
again. She remembered how she had kept apart from him, enclosed
herself in a reserve that he should never break. She remembered the
times when he had scolded her, coldly, bitterly, and she had stood,
her face as a rock, her heart beating but her body without movement,
then had turned and gone silently from the room. All her wicked,
cold heart that in some strange way cared for love but could not
make those movements towards others that would show that it cared.
What was it in her? Would she always, through life, miss the things
for which she longed through her coldness and obstinacy?

She took her father's photograph, stared at it, gazed into it, held
it in an agony of remorse. She shivered in the cold of her room but
did not know it. Her candle, caught in some draught, blew out, and
instantly the white world without leapt in upon her and her room was
lit with a strange unearthly glow. She saw nothing but her father.
At last she fell asleep in the chair, clutching in her hand the