Sometimes she stayed to help the little mother indoors, but, on the whole, she preferred being out in the open air with the blind man.
Then came the beginning of winter, and she went with him up the hillsides, and in among the storms to fold the sheep, and drive the cattle home to the byres.
And then midwinter, when, in the morning, they had to set to work by lanthorn light that cast a luminous yellow circle round them upon the snow, and made their great shadows dance strangely.
Then the snows swept down into the valley and covered everything up beneath the soft white waves, so that, when they wanted to go out, they had to get through one of the roof-windows, for the door was all covered up. Then indeed it was very cold work getting about, and the Queen had always to guide the blind man, because the had covered all his familiar landmarks. The made it very hard walking, too, and put the Queen quite out of breath, but he sang quite lustily a song—
"'Cold hands, warm heart,'
Then let the wind blow cold
On our clasped hands who fare across the wold.
"'Hard lot, hot love,'
Then let out pathway go
Through lone, grey lands; knee-deep amid the snow."
But the Queen was generally too out of breath to be able to sing at all.
At last, however, the snow came right over the roof-tree, and they could not go out of the house at all. So they sat quietly around a great fire, and the little old woman span, and the Queen worked at the loom, and the blind man wove baskets out of osiers. And they told tales.
Said the little old woman, "I will tell you a tale that I had from my grandmother, and she had it from hers, and so on, a great way back.
"Once upon a time, upon the earth there were no people at all, no men and women, but only little goblin things that covered the whole earth and made it a beautiful green colour. But the sun was a bright flame colour, and the moon very, very white. So the Sun and the Earth took to quarrelling as to which was the more beautiful of the two.
"Said the Earth, 'I am the more beautiful; such a lovely green as mine was surely never seen.'