It made her feel lenient to Dominick, whose indifference and neglect had put her to the torments of the last fortnight. After all, he could not have let her know his whereabouts. The wires were only just up, and the rural mail-carrier had not yet been able to effect an entrance into the snow-bound town. Why Dominick had chosen to go in this direction and had attempted an impossible walk in a heavy snowstorm Berny did not know, nor just now care much. A sensation as near remorse and tenderness as she could feel possessed her. Under its softening influence—spurred to generosity and magnanimity by the lifting of the weight of anxiety—she decided that she would write to him. She would write him a letter which would smooth out the difficulties between them and bring him home ready to forgive and be once more his old self, kind, quiet, and indulgent, as he had been in the first year of their marriage.

Then and there, without further waiting, she wrote the letter. It ran as follows:

“My Dear Husband:—I have only just seen in the paper where you are, and, oh, the relief! For two weeks now I have been half crazy, wondering about you, waiting to hear from you. And nothing ever came. Dominick, dear, if you had seen me sitting here alone in the den every evening, thinking and waiting, looking at the clock and listening all the time, even when I was trying to read—listening for your footsteps which never came—you would have felt very sorry for me; even you, who were so angry that you left me without a word. It’s just been hell this last two weeks. You may not think by the way I acted that I would have cared, but I did, I do. If I didn’t love you would I mind how your people treated me? That’s what makes it so hard, because I love you and want you to be happy with me, and it’s dreadful for me to see them always getting in between us, till sometimes lately I have felt they were going to separate us altogether.

“Oh, my dear husband, don’t let that happen! Don’t let them drive me away from you! If I have been bad-humored and unreasonable, I have had to bear a lot. I am sorry for the past. I am sorry for what I said to you that night, and for turning on the gas and scratching the bed. I am ready to acknowledge that I was wrong, and was mean and hateful. And now you ought to be ready to forgive me and forget it all. Come back to me. Please come back. Don’t be angry with me. I am your wife. You chose me of your own free will. That I loved you so that I forgot honor and public opinion and had no will but yours, you know better than any one else in the world. It isn’t every man, Dominick, that gets that kind of love. I gave it then and I’ve never stopped giving it, though I’ve often been so put upon and enraged that I’ve said things I didn’t mean and done things I’ve been ready to kill myself for. Here I am now, waiting for you, longing for you. Come back to me.

Your loving wife,
Berny.”

She read the letter over several times and it pleased her greatly. So anxious was she to have it go as soon as possible that, though it was past ten, she took it out herself and posted it in the letter-box at the corner.

CHAPTER VII
SNOW-BOUND

While the world went about its affairs, attended to its business, read its papers, sent its telegrams and wrote its letters, the little group at Antelope was as completely cut off from it as though marooned on a strip of sand in an unknown sea. A second storm had followed the original one, and the end of the first week saw them snowed in deeper than ever, Antelope a trickle of roofs and smoke-stacks, in a white, crystal-clear wilderness, solemn in its stillness and loneliness as the primeval world.

The wires were down; the letter-carrier could not break his way in to them. They heard no news and received no mail. Confined in a group of rude buildings, crouched in a hollow of the Sierra’s flank, they felt for the first time what it was to be outside that circle of busy activity in which their lives had heretofore passed. They were face to face with the nature they thought they had conquered and which now in its quiet grandeur awed them with a sense of their own small helplessness. Pressed upon by that enormous silent indifference they drew nearer together, each individual unit gaining in importance from the contrasting immensity without, each character unconsciously declaring itself, emerging from acquired reticences and becoming bolder and more open.

They accepted their captivity in a spirit of gay good humor. The only two members of the party to whom it seemed irksome were Bill Cannon and the actor, both girding against a confinement which kept them from their several spheres of action. The others abandoned themselves to a childish, almost fantastic enjoyment of a situation unique in their experience. It was soon to end, it would never be repeated. It was an adventure charged with romance, accidental, unsought, as all true adventures are. The world was forgotten for these few days of imprisonment against the mountain’s mighty heart. It did not exist for them. All that was real was their own little party, the whitewashed passages and walls of Perley’s, the dining-room with its board floor and homely fare, and the parlor at night with a semicircle of faces round the blazing logs.