One afternoon, when the landscape was white and hard, Eugenia went out into the deserted sheep pasture where the dead oak stood. A winter sunset was burning like a bonfire in the west, and as far as the red horizon swept an unbroken waste of snow. The rail fences shone silver in their coat of frost, and from the blackened tree above her pendants of ice were shot with light. Across the field a flock of gaunt crows flew, casting purple shadows.
Eugenia leaned against the oak and stared vacantly at the landscape—at the sunset, and at the waste of snow, across which flitted the demoniac shadows of the crows. Her eyes saw only the desolation and the death; they were sealed to the grandeur.
A sense of her own loneliness swept over her with the loneliness of nature. Her own isolation—the isolation of a strong soul in pain—walled her apart as with a wall of ice. That assurance of human companionship on which she had based her future seemed suddenly annihilated. She was alone and life was before her.
Then, as she turned her gaze, a man's figure broke upon the field of snow, coming towards her. It was Dudley Webb, and in the resolute swing of his carriage, in the resistless ardour of his eyes, he seemed to reach her from east and west, from north and south, surrounding her with a warmth of summer.
As he looked at her he held out his arms.
"Eugie—poor girl! dear girl!"
In the desolation of her life he stood to her as the hearth of home to a wanderer in the frozen North.
For an instant she held back, and then, with a sob, she yielded.
"I must be loved," she said. "I must be loved or I shall die."
Around them the winter landscape reddened as the sunset broke, and above their heads the crows flew, cawing, across the snow.