her face. Away the sound rolled, borne by the impetuous wind-wave
that had caught it up as the old bell shivered it off, and carried
it away so swiftly that it seemed to die almost in the moment it was
born. The listeners waited, holding their breaths. Then, swept from
the course this first peal had taken, the second came to their ears
after a long interval muffled and from a distance, followed almost
instantly by the third, which went booming past them louder than the
first. And so, with strange intervals and variations of time and
sound as the wind dashed wildly onward or broke and swerved from its
course, the noon of night was struck, and the silence that for a
brief time succeeded left a feeling of awe upon the hearts of these
lonely women.

To the ears of another had come these strange and solemn tones,
struck out at midnight away up in the clear rush of the tempest, and
swept away in a kind of mad sport, and tossed about in the murky
sky. To the ears of another, who, struggling and battling with the
storm, had made his way with something of a blind instinct to within
a short distance of his home, every stroke of the clock seemed to
come from a different quarter; and when the last peal rang out, it
left him in helpless bewilderment. When he staggered on again, it
was in a direction opposite to that in which he had been going. For
ten minutes he wrought with the blinding and suffocating snow,
which, turn as he would, the wind kept dashing into his face, and
then his failing limbs gave out and he sunk benumbed with cold upon
the pavement. Half buried in the snow, he was discovered soon
afterward and carried to a police station, where he found himself
next morning in one of the cells, a wretched, humiliated, despairing
man.