A hare crossed his path and turned his thoughts into another channel. He aimed and hit it. The little animal rotated three times, and then lay motionless on its nose.
"She will be pleased," he thought, as he slung his booty over his shoulder. Ah! there he was thinking of her again already.
The sky meanwhile had clouded. A sharp shower of prickly white flakes cut through the trees; a wild hiss now mingled with the roar of the wind that made him shiver involuntarily in every limb. By aid of his compass he found the way home. When he entered the open fields the snow-storm was in full swing. He could scarcely stand against it. The air was dark with the falling masses of snow. There was not a trace visible of the shrubs in the park only three hundred feet away.
"It's to be hoped she's got home," he thought, as he struggled on.
Freshly fallen snow lay thick on the Cats' Bridge; there were no footprints in it, but they might easily have been obliterated.
With a sinking heart, he ran to the house and called her by name, but got no answer. The hearth was unswept, the fire out, the beds unmade as he had left them.
She had been overtaken by the storm, that she feared more than she feared the Schrandeners. A torturing uneasiness took possession of him. He rushed from one room to the other, lit the fire and extinguished it again, tried to eat, and then threw down his knife and fork impatiently. It struck him as ludicrous that he should be so anxious. Had she not for six winters gone backwards and forwards in wind and rain and snow, and never yet met with an accident? Why should anything happen to her to-day? To kill time he sat down to his desk, and with numb fingers made out a cheque. The sum amounted to three figures. Regina ought to be satisfied.
Darkness set in. The hand of the clock pointed to three, and yet it was already like night. He could contain himself indoors no longer. He would at least go as far as the Cats' Bridge and see if there was any sign of her. To prevent the wind pitching him over, he was obliged to hold on with all his might to the balustrade. The rickety woodwork shook in all its joints. On the ice beneath him danced a maze of spiral patterns; lily-stems grew upwards and sank again in heaps of white dust, which in their turn were whirled away to make room for other fantastic forms. The Madonna's garden rose for a moment and then vanished; for a figure drew nearer and nearer out of the twilight, casting its shadow before it.
"Regina, thank God!"
He was on the point of rushing to meet her, when he was overcome with a sensation of shame that paralysed his limbs and drove the blood to his heart.