gnaw. Where's the hatchet?"

For a time she chopped and hacked, and Stewart, shepherding the
splinters which flew into the snow, piled them--splinters, most precious
of all--_petit bois_ to set a fire alight; and the afternoon grew bluer,
deeper. Stewart worked in a reverie--Fanny in a heat of expectation. One
mused reposedly on life--the other warmly of the immediate hours
before her.

"Now I'm going to fetch the car," said Stewart at last. "Will you stay
here and go on cutting till I come? There are two more logs."

She walked away up the drive, and Fanny picked the hatchet out of the
snow and started on the leathery, damp end of a fresh log. It would not
split, the tapping marred the white silence, and yet again she let the
hatchet fall and sat down on the log instead. It was nearly six--they
had spent the whole afternoon splitting up the logs, and making a fine
pile of short pieces for firewood; the forest was darkening rapidly,
blue deepened above the trees to indigo, and black settled among the
trunks. Only the snow sent up its everlasting shine. Her thoughts fell
and rose. Now they were upon the ground busy with a multitude of small
gleams and sparkles--now they were up and away through the forest
tunnels to Chantilly. What would he say first? How look when he met her?

"Ah, I am a silly woman in a fever! Yet happy--for I see beauty in
everything, in the world, upon strange faces, in nights and days. Upon
what passes behind the glassy eyes" (she pressed her own) "depends
sight, or no sight. There is a life within life, and only I" (she
thought arrogantly, her peopled world bounded by her companions) "am
living in it. We are afraid, we are ashamed, but when one dares talk of