XXI


Twilight had three times descended on the drear land. Three times
Gabriella, standing at her windows and looking out upon the snow
and ice, had seen everything disappear. How softly white were the
snow-covered trees; how soft the black that thickened about them
till they were effaced. Gabriella thought of them as still
perfectly white out there in the darkness. Three evenings with her
face against the pane she had watched for a familiar figure to
stalk towering up the yard path, and no familiar figure had come.
Three evenings she had returned to her firelight, and sat before it
with an ear on guard for the sound of a familiar step on the porch
below; but no step had been heard.

On the first night she had all but hoped that he would not seek
her; the avowal of their love for each other had well-nigh left it
an unendurable joy. But the second night she had begun to expect
him confidently; and when the hour had passed and he had not come,
Gabriella sat long before her fire with a new wound--she who had
felt so many. By the third day she had reviewed all that she had
ever heard of him or known of him: gathered it all afresh as a
beautiful thing for receiving him with when he should come to her
that night. Going early to her room she had taken her chair to the
window and with her face close to the pane had watched again--
watched that white yard; and again nothing moved in that white yard