Walking alone a slender girl with dark hair and eyes lifted her face to let the snow melt upon her cheeks. She looked fragile, as if she were just recovering from an illness, nor did her expression betray any special interest in Christmas.
"These woods are as lovely as I remember them," she said aloud. "It is true, I never could find a place in Belgium I liked half so well."
Then she stopped a moment and glanced around her.
"I do hope Barbara and Dick won't discover I have run away. I feel as much a truant as if I were a small girl. But they surely won't be tramping through my woods at present, when they assured me they would spend several hours at the chateau. So I can't be found out till it is too late. I feel I must see Nicolete's little log house and Nona's 'Pool of Melisande.'"
Ten minutes after Eugenia arrived at the desired place. The lake of clear water which she had once described as the "pool of truth" was today covered with a thin coating of ice at its edges. The center was as untroubled as it had always been. Above it tall evergreen trees leaned so close to one another that their summits almost touched.
Eugenia breathed deeply of the fragrance of the snow and the pine. The day was an unusually cold one for this part of the country, but the winter was being everywhere severe. It was as if nature would make no easier the task of her children's destruction of each other.
But Eugenia was not thinking of warlike things at this hour. She was merely feeling a physical pleasure in her own returning strength.
Yet just as she was congratulating herself on having been able to walk so far without tiring, the girl experienced a sudden, overpowering sensation of fatigue.
For several moments she stood upright fighting her weakness; she even turned and started back toward home. Then recognizing her own folly, Eugenia looked for a place to rest.
But she did not look very far nor in but one direction. Yes, the log was there in the same place it had been six months before.