Cinthia was only a girl, after all, with the usual feminine attributes.
As she swung herself carefully from branch to branch of the vine, hoping and longing for her feet to touch terra firma, yet sustained by unfaltering courage, there came to her a sudden wild and terrifying thought that made the blood run colder in her veins than all the raging storm had force to do.
She had remembered that of late the immense vine to which she clung had afforded a delightful gymnasium for a score or so of large rodents, causing her aunt to threaten to cut it down.
The feminine mind has one idiosyncrasy known of all men, and accordingly ridiculed, but never overcome. Cinthia did not pretend to be stronger than her sex. With that sudden terrifying thought an uncontrollable shriek burst from her lips, her numb hands relaxed their grasp, and she went crashing down through space plump into a great, great bank of drifted snow blown into a heap below the vine.
Everard Dawn heard that shriek as he tossed on his pillow in restless dreams, and suddenly raised his head.
“What a night!” he cried, for he had been watching the storm ere he retired. “How the wind howls to-night, shrieking like a human voice through that splendid pine on the corner! How I used to love the wind in the pines in my far Southern home until—afterward! But since then it is an embodied grief to me, as in the plaint of one of our Southern poets:
“‘I hear the wind in the pines
With its soughing of wordless woe,
And the whisper of leafless vines,
Like a sad heart’s overflow.