The snow melted from underneath, sinking with audible groans of collapse and running off across the frozen ground to swell Hidden Creek. The river roared into a yellow flood, tripped its trees, sliced at its banks. Sheila snowshoed down twice a day to look at it. It was a sufficient barrier, she thought, between her and the world. And now, she had attained to the savage joy of loneliness. She dreaded change. Above all she dreaded Hilliard. That warmth of his beauty had faded utterly from her senses. It seemed as faint as a fresco on a long-buried wall. Intrusion must bring anxiety and pain, it might bring fear. She had had long communion with her stars and the God whose name they signaled. She, with her dog friend under her hand, had come to something very like content.
The roar of Hidden Creek swelled and swelled. After the snow had shrunk into patches here and there under the pines and against hilly slopes, there was still the melting of the mountain glaciers.
"Nobody can possibly cross!" Sheila exulted. "A man would have to risk his life." And it was in one of those very moments of her savage self-congratulation when there came the sound of nearing hoofs.
She was sitting on her threshold, watching the slow darkness, a sifting-down of ashes through the still air. It was so very still that the little new moon hung there above the firs like faint music. Silver and gray, and silver and green, and violet—Sheila named the delicacies of dappled light. The stars had begun to shake little shivers of radiance through the firs. They were softer than the winter stars—their keenness melted by the warm blue of the air. Sheila sat and held her knees and smiled. The distant, increasing tumult of the river, so part of the silence that it seemed no sound at all, lulled her—Then—above it—the beat of horse's hoofs.
At first she just sat empty of sensation except for the shock of those faint thuds of sound. Then her heart began to beat to bursting; with dread, with a suffocation of suspense. She got up, quiet as a thief. The horse stopped. There came a step, rapid and eager. She fled like a furtive shadow into the house, fell on her knees there by the hearth, and hid her face against the big hide-covered chair. Her eyes were full of cold tears. Her finger-tips were ice. She was shaking—shuddering, rather—from head to foot. The steps had come close, had struck the threshold. There they stopped. After a pause, which her pulses filled with shaken rhythm, her name was spoken—So long it had been since she had heard it that it fell on her ear like a foreign speech.
"Sheila! Sheila!"
She lifted her head sharply. It was not Hilliard's voice.
"Sheila—" There was such an agony of fear in the softly spoken syllables, there was such a weight of dread on the breath of the speaker, that, for very pity, Sheila forgot herself. She got up from the floor and moved dazedly to meet the figure on the threshold. It was dimly outlined against the violet evening light. Sheila came up quite close and put her hands on the tense, hanging arms. They caught her. Then she sobbed and laughed aloud, calling out in her astonishment again and again, softly, incredulously—
"You, Dickie? Oh, Dickie, Dickie, it's—you?"