With that, by carefully untwisting his legs, he faced again in the right direction, but, having lifted his right foot too high in the untwisting process, he found that the slender tail of its snow-shoe stuck down in the snow, setting the shoe pointing skyward and his toe, tied by the thongs, held prisoner about a foot above the snow. He tried to kick, but the shoe became more firmly embedded. He lost his balance, and only by a wild fling of his body, in which his arms went up into the air, did he regain his upright position. The moment of calm which succeeded produced from him another remark.
'It seems to me that you have got me now in closer bonds than before.' As he spoke he turned his glance backward and saw that comment of his was needless.
The girl had at last yielded to laughter. Worn out, no doubt, by a long-controlled excitement, laughter had now entirely overcome her. Leaning her head on her hand and her shoulders against a pillar of the porch, she was shaking visibly from head to foot, and the effort she made to keep the sound of her amusement within check only seemed to make its hold upon her more absolute.
'I don't wonder you laugh,' he said, feebly beginning to laugh himself a little.
But she did not make the slightest reply. Her face was crimson; the ripples of her laughter went over her form as ripples of wind over a young tree.
He was forced to leave her thus. By a miracle of determination, as it seemed, he freed his right shoe and made slow and wary strides forward. He saw that he had exaggerated the width of his snow-shoes, but his progress now was still made upon the plan of keeping his feet wide apart, although not too wide for motion. He knew that this was not the right method; he knew that she peered at him between her fingers and was more convulsed with laughter at his every step. He was thankful to think that the falling flakes must soon begin to obscure his figure, but he did not dare to try another plan of walking while she watched, lest she should see him stop again.
Chapter V
Courthope had struck across to the main road at right angles to the poplar avenue. The poplars stood slim, upright, more like a stiff and regular formation of feathery seaweed growing out of a frozen ocean than like trees upon a plain. He was nearing a grove of elm and birch which he had not seen the evening before; by the almost hidden rails of the fence there were half-buried shrubs. So dry, so hard, so absolutely without bud or sere leaf was the interlacing outline of the trees and shrubs, that they too seemed to be some strange product of this new sort of ocean; they did not remind him of verdant glades. Not that beauty was absent, nor charm, but the scene was strange, very strange; the domain of the laughing princess, on whom he had turned his back, was, in the daylight, more than ever an enchanted land which he could fancy to be unknown in story and until now unexplored by man. Such ideas only came to him by snatches; the rest of him, mind and body, was summed up in a fierce determination to catch the thief and bring back his spoils. Whether by this he would prove himself honest or guilty, he neither knew nor felt that he cared.