"Those are no dunes, my dear friend, only black shadows on the snow of your own lands," I assured her, "and it is one of your own men with a lantern going on your own errand. It is the fallen snow that takes those strange spire-like shapes—no castle. This wind wails too much for your nerves. Look in, at the fire and the warm hall."
"No, no," she said quietly, "I love to look out—I am not afraid. I never know when I may see the Castle. And what you said about my rest.... Well, it seems to open my lips. It was on just such a night ... how cold the stars were! And I had nearly lost myself—hunting for my rest! When the moon rises I will tell you."
And then I knew that I was to hear one of those strange experiences of hers. As always, she spoke quickly, often halting for long between swift gushes of narrative, now as one who reads from an old book about a stranger, now like the adventurer himself. She did not always or steadily employ the style into which I have thrown her words, but she wrapped me in an atmosphere, and from that and the remembrance of a rising winter moon and a still, cold night, I write.
Her old friend the great physician, who now, in the evening of his busy life, attended only upon those whose necessities baffled the less experienced, pursed his lips and stared at her out of a grizzle of white hair.
"And what will you do," he asked abruptly, "when I have convinced them that you are unable to keep up these various relations that have been so many years a-building? Where will you go for this great rest?"
"Somewhere where I can be alone," she answered him, firmly, "where I can fold my hands by some quiet, lonely river, and think, where I can realize what I am; a widow, lonely for her best and life-long friend, a mother whose children need her no longer, a woman who has tasted life long enough and paid her debt to the world, and would slip out of it quietly. Surely that is little to ask?"
"I should say that the fact of your living showed you had not yet paid your debt to life," he said drily, "and I confess that I cannot see any great value in realizing these things you speak of. If they are so, they are so. Let them be."
"Oh, you are a man!" she cried bitterly.
"And I know, therefore, what a woman needs," he said, "and you, especially, who have many gifts denied, mostly, to your sex. Believe me, there is only one river for you—it is, literally, the River of Life."