Gwen changed her dress, put on her best hair ribbon, her brooch, and her locket, then peeped cautiously down the stairs. Although she felt full of self-assertion, she had no wish to risk a further encounter with Beatrice. All seemed quiet, so, donning hat and coat, she crept to the cupboard where mackintoshes and galoshes were kept, and armed herself to defy the weather. It was quite an easy matter to slip out by the back door, and in less than ten seconds she was hurrying through the village, chuckling at her own daring and cleverness. Thick flakes were whirling everywhere: when she looked upwards they showed as little dark patches against the neutral-tinted sky, but when they passed the line of vision, each soft lump of crystals gleamed purest white as it joined the ever-deepening mass below. Every gate and stump and rubbish heap was a thing of beauty, glorified by the ethereal covering of the snow; the dead clumps of ragwort by the road side, the withered branches of oak, the shrivelled trails of bramble all seemed transformed by the feathery particles into a species of fairyland.
As Gwen left the village, and took the path that led across the moor, she seemed to walk into a cloud of whiteness that enclosed her and shut her out from all before or behind. She stood still for a moment, and drew in her breath with a sense of intense exhilaration. She was all by herself in the midst of this new-found world of snow, and the very solitude had a fascination. It is good sometimes for the spirit to be alone; strange vague thoughts, half memories, half imaginings, fill the brain like a full high tide; strong impressions, unfelt and unknowable in the distraction of human company, force themselves silently yet persistently upon us; the corporal and the tangible lose their hard outlines and begin to merge into the in visible—in such moments the soul grows. It is perhaps one of the disadvantages of a large family that the members are apt to lack what one might call spiritual elbow room, the constant close companionship, the fridging and rubbing of the continual, daily, hourly intercourse, though an excellent discipline for the temper, leaves scant opportunity for the development of the individuality. Gwen could not have explained this in the least, but as she stood in the still quiet of the falling snow, she felt as if all the little fretting cares and worries and squabbles and anxieties dropped away into a subordinate place, and she were viewing life with another range of vision, where the proportions of things were quite changed.
She walked on, almost as if she were in a dream, without even the sound of a footstep to break the intense silence. She was now on the open wold, where there were neither hedges nor walls, but only a few stones to mark the road from the sedgy, heathery expanse of moor that stretched on either side. Gwen knew the way so thoroughly that she thought she could have followed it blindfold. Every rock and boulder and bush were familiar, and as a rule were so many points along the daily path to school. Now, however, all the well-known landmarks seemed to have a strange similarity, and to be merging into one great white waste, in which tree stump was indistinguishable from stone or gorse clump. The light was fading rapidly, for the clouds went on gathering, and the flakes came down ever thicker and faster. So far Gwen had gone on with the utmost confidence, but now she stopped and entertained a doubt. She did not recognize the boulder on her right, and the juniper bush on her left was surely strange.
"I verily believe I've come wrong somehow," she muttered. "There's nothing for it but to turn back."
She could see her own footsteps in the snow behind, and for some hundreds of yards she traced them; then they began to get fainter and fainter, and presently they were hidden entirely by the new-fallen flakes. The road was completely obliterated, there was nothing round her but shapeless indefinite whiteness. Then it dawned upon Gwen's soul that she was lost, lost hopelessly on the bare wold, where she might wander for miles without seeing the gleam of a farmhouse window or hearing even the bark of a shepherd's dog. The solitude that before had seemed so inspiring, suddenly became oppressive loneliness. What was she to do? Tramp on and on, perhaps in a circle, till she could go no farther? Already it was heavy walking, and under the rocks and bushes the drifts were deepening. Yet it would never do to sit down in the snow. Tired as she was, she must keep moving, and while the faintest gleam of daylight lasted she must try and find some guide-post to civilization.
"I wish I'd brought Jingles. I never thought of him," she sighed, longing regretfully for the shaggy Irish terrier that acted watchdog at the Parsonage. "I wonder how soon they'll miss me at home? Not till tea-time, I expect, and then they'll probably think I'm at the Chambers'. Beatrice would guess where I'd gone. How furiously angry she'll be!"
For the first time a little awkward uncomfortable inward suggestion began to croak that elder sisters are occasionally right, and may even be wiser in their generation than tall girls who have entered the Fifth. Gwen's cough, which had been hacking all day, came on much worse, and began to hurt her chest: she wished she had brought her thick muffler. It was a subject of perennial dispute between herself and Beatrice, and she often discarded it simply because the latter told her to put it on. She hated to appear mollycoddlish, and sometimes indeed did very silly things out of sheer foolhardiness. At present she was bitterly cold. The snow had sifted inside her galoshes, and made her feet wet, and the chilly wind was creeping down her neck and up her sleeves, and whirling frozen flakes at her face. No cheery tea in the Chambers' drawing-room, and no delightful chat with Dick afterwards about photography and magic lanterns.
"The fact of the matter is that I've been an idiot!" she confessed to herself. "Anybody with an ounce of sense would have known it was too snowy to cross the wold. I ought to have gone round by the high road. I seemed to turn across here just out of habit."
Gwen could not tell how long she stumbled about. It felt like interminable hours as she wearily dragged herself along, watching the sky grow darker, and the landscape more and more blurred, till she could scarcely distinguish which was snow and which was sky. At last her aching limbs absolutely refused to carry her any farther, and she crouched under the shelter of a big juniper bush that overhung a piece of rock. Here at least she was out of the biting, freezing wind. The comparative warmth made her feel sleepy. She roused herself with an effort. To sleep in the snow, she knew, was fatal, so she fell to rubbing her hands and feet to try and restore the circulation. All at once she started up and shouted aloud.
In the distance she had heard a short, sharp yelp, and she reasoned that where there was a dog, a man might possibly be following. Again and again she called, till, to her intense relief, a "Hallo!" came in answer, and she made out a snowy form moving in her direction. The dog found her first; it bounded at her, whining and sniffing at her skirts, then rushed away barking loudly to inform its master of her whereabouts.