Yet his heart was heavy as he went; and it seemed to him even as though he had thrust some mountain-bird with pinions that would cleave the clouds, and eyes that would seek the sun, and a song that would rise with the dawn, and a courage that would breast the thunder, down into the darkness of a trap, to be shorn and crippled and silenced for evermore.
"I will see her to-morrow," he told himself; restless with a vague remorse, as though the good he had done had been evil.
But when the morrow dawned there had happened that to Phratos which forbade him to see whether it were well with her that day or any day in all the many years that came.
For Phratos that night, being blinded and shrouded in the storm of snow, lost such slender knowledge as he had of that northern country, and wandered far afield, not knowing where he was in the wide white desert, on which no single star-ray shone.
The violence of the storm grew with the hours. The land was a sheet of snow. The plains were dim and trackless as a desert. Sheep were frozen in their folds, and cattle drowned amidst the ice in the darkness. All lights were out, and the warning peals of the bells were drowned in the tempest of the winds.
The land was strange to him, and he lost all knowledge where he was. Above, beneath, around, were the dense white rolling clouds of snow. Now and then through the tumult of the hurricane there was blown a strange harsh burst of jangled chimes that wailed a moment loudly on the silence and then died again.
At many doors he knocked: the doors of little lonely places standing in the great colorless waste.
But each door, being opened cautiously, was with haste shut in his face again.
"It is a gypsy," the people muttered, and were afraid; and they drew their bars closer and huddled together in their beds, and thanked their saints that they were safe beneath a roof.
He wrapped his sheepskin closer round him and set his face against the blast.