The barn had become a battle-field of hunger and life. This was the
second day of famine--all seeds being buried first under ice and
now under snow; swift hunger sending the littler ones to this
granary, the larger following to prey on them. To-night there would
be owls and in the darkness tragedies. In the morning, perhaps, he
would find a feather which had floated from a breast. A hundred
years ago, he reflected, the wolves would have gathered here also
and the cougar and the wildcat for bigger game.

It was sunset as he left the stable, his work done. Beside the yard
gate there stood a locust tree, and on a bough of this, midway up,
for he never goes to the tree-tops at this season, David saw a
cardinal. He was sitting with his breast toward the clear crimson
sky; every twig around him silver filigree; the whole tree
glittering with a million gems of rose and white, gold and green;
and wherever a fork, there a hanging of snow. The bird's crest was
shot up. He had come forth to look abroad upon this strange wreck
of nature and peril to his kind. David had scarcely stopped before
him when with a quick shy movement he dived down into one of his
ruined winter fortresses-a cedar dismembered and flattened out,
never to rise again.

The supper that evening was a very quiet one. David felt that his
father's eyes were often on him reproachfully; and that his
mother's were approvingly on his father's. Time and again during
the meal the impulse well-nigh overcame him to speak to his father
then and there; but he knew it would be a cruel, angry scene; and
each time the face of Gabriella restrained him. It was for peace;
and his heart shut out all discord from around that new tenderer
figure of her which had come forth within him this day.