'What's the matter, mother?' murmured her daughter.
'Nothing, child, nothing. It's only the wind. Hush! we mustn't wake father. Go to sleep, darling!'
The sun rose late the next morning, and a dim blood-veil was in the sky, which made some of them think that it was night still. The miners found the snow round their huts to be three feet deep. They looked anxious at this.
'We can master the snow,' they whispered to one another, 'but the snow-drift will master us.'
Even as they spoke, the wind, which had lulled, began to moan again, and before they had been working an hour shovelling away the snow, the wind-storm, bringing the snow with it from the heights over which it rushed, blinded them, and drove them into their tents for shelter. They could not hold their feet. 'Let us hope it'll not last long,' they said; and they took advantage of every lull to work against their enemy, not like men, but like heroes.
'What makes you so downcast, Saul?' asked David; he had not begun to lose heart.
Saul looked in silence at David's wife and David's daughter; they were at the far end of the hut.
'You are not frightened, Saul, surely?' said David.
'Not for my self, David,' whispered Saul. 'But tell me. What kind of love do you bear for your wife and child?' David's look was sufficient answer. 'I have a perfect love for a woman also, David. If she were here, as your wife is with you, I could bear it, and so could she. David, we are beset by a terrible danger. Listen to the wind. I am afraid we may never get out of this.'
David's lips quivered, but he shook away the fear.