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It stumbled heavily on the threshold, and then darted forward so swiftly that he did not hear the direction of the porter that they should turn only at the third alley. Tall and frosted trees reached up into the dim skies, the deserted avenues were shrouded in mist, and there was a dead and dripping silence.
Her face was the face of the beautiful portrait on the wall, grown twice as old, but with the lines of beauty still clear under the unnecessary touches of rouge, so that sometimes, despite her frosted hair, one could imagine her life at its spring-tide. This was especially so when the sunshine leapt into her eyes.
A kind of icy varnish of cold overlaid the gay lables of the canned goods; the remnants of red and blue tartan exposed for sale looked coarse-grained with the cold, and cold slips of ribbons clung to the glass of the cases like the tongues of children tipped to the frosted panes. Even the super-heated stove took on a purplish tinge of chilblains, roughed by the wind.
The walls, of unpainted aethereum, were broken up into panels by fluted pilasters with richly-moulded capitals, each panel having a frosted border covered with delicate tracery, whilst the central portion of the panel was left plain and polished, serving the purpose of a mirror, in which the room and its multiplied reflections on the opposite wall was again reflected in a long perspective.
The clock ticked, the coals blazed higher, and contended with the white radiance that poured in through the windows. Unnoticed, the sun occupied his sky, and the shadows of the tree stems, extraordinarily solid, fell like trenches of purple across the frosted lawn. It was a glorious winter morning.
I could see the flash of them, too, as they went by the light from the frosted windows in the kitchen basement, but nothing else showed outside in the old walled garden, for it was as black as a pocket. Not later than ten I crawled up the stairs and stood for a minute in the dining-room.
"It's Jim!" she called, and rose to her feet, her face radiant with relief. Rivers came rushing up to the door in a two-horse sleigh and leaped out with a shout of greeting, though he could not see her at the frosted window. A moment later he burst in, vigorous, smiling, defiant of the cold. "Hello! All alone? How are you?"
The waters that slid so languidly between the two silent men as not to crook one line of the station-house's image inverted in their clear dark depths, had not yet caught a beam upon their whitest water-lily, nor yet upon their tallest bulrush; but the tops of the giant cypresses were green and luminous, and as the Acadian glanced abroad westward, in the open sky far out over the vast marshy breadths of the "shaking prairie," two still clouds, whose under surfaces were yet dusky and pink, sparkled on their sunward edges like a frosted fleece.
The dignified, kingly figure of a man, no longer young, bowed with sorrow under the Imperial heritage, preceding the splendid sombre company of crowned heads; the blaze of uniforms and orders, the clank of sword and bridle, the potent ring of steel on steel, the sumptuously-trapped, shining horses pacing slowly, drawing the mourning-carriages of State, their closed windows, frosted with chilly fog, yielding scant glimpses of well-known faces.
"We'll finish this ditch on time even if hell freezes over," he said, slowly. "I'm not going to be beaten at this late day." He continued to sit gazing at the frosted panes and harkening to the roaring blasts. On the floor and in the chairs the blanketed men slept heavily. Pat fed the fire anew.
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