“You’re cold,” he said, hearing her nevertheless.
“A little––not very,” she answered bravely.
But he knew very well how keenly she was suffering. His injured leg pained him almost beyond endurance, as if the frost had been concentrated there. There was nothing he could say or do for her or for himself.
Toward morning, the fury of the storm having abated, they slept a little, fitfully and uneasily, in the half-insensibility to suffering that complete exhaustion brings. But they were glad when the first gray light of morning stole in among the shadows and touched their eyelids. With one accord, as if in a common apprehension, and moved by a single fear, they raised their heads, and at the first glance about them, sat up staring.
The meadow lay white under its first coverlet of snow, the trees were draped in their winter mantles, their very bed had its downy quilt of snowflakes that had sifted through the branches of the tree.
“It’s come,” said Haig simply.
“Yes,” she answered, in a voice that echoed a tragic calm.
“But it was due.”
“Seth kept saying we’d have a hard and early winter.”