of that moment. As the storm had increased, a terrible dread had chilled
her very soul. Every louder blast than usual had caused her an internal
shiver, while for her husband's sake she had controlled herself
outwardly. Like a shipwrecked man who is clinging to a rock, that he
fears the tide will submerge, she had watched the snow rise from one
rail to another along the fence. When darkness set in it was half-way
up to the top rail, and she knew it was _drifting_. The thought of her
ruddy, active, joyous-hearted boy, whose affection and hopefulness had
been the broad track of sunlight on her hard path--the thought of his
lying white and still beneath one of these great banks, just where she
could never know till spring rains and suns revealed to an indifferent
stranger his sleeping-place--now nearly overwhelmed her also, and even
her faith wavered on the brink of the dark gulf of despair into which
her husband was sinking. Left to herself, she might have sunk for a
time, though her sincere belief in God's goodness and love would have
triumphed. But her womanly, unselfish nature, her long habit of
sustaining and comforting her husband, came to her aid. Breathing a
quick prayer to Heaven, which was scarcely more than a gasp and a glance
upward, she asked, hardly knowing what she said, "And what if he is
_not_ lost? What if God restores him safe and well?"

She shuddered after she had thus spoken, for she saw that her husband's
belief in the hostility of God had reached almost the point of insanity.
If this test failed, would he not, in spite of all she could say or do,
curse God and die, as he had said? But she had been guided in her
words more than she knew. He that careth for the fall of the sparrow
had not forgotten His children in their sore extremity.

The man in answer to her question relaxed his hold upon her arm, and
with a long breath fell back on his pillow.