"Ye—as—"
"Hard sledding?"
The two men exchanged amicable nothings in the crisp, brilliant air through which their voices rang with a peculiar timbre. To Isabelle, looking and listening from her window, it was all so fresh, so simple, like a picture on a Japanese print! For the first time in months she had a distinct desire,—to get outside and look at the hills.
"You are commanded," announced Margaret, a little later, "to the doctor's for supper at six. That wasn't the way it was put exactly, but it amounts to the same thing. The doctor's least word is a command here…. Now I am off to help the housekeeper with the accounts,—it's all I am good for!"…
So Isabelle was left to set forth on her ramble of exploration by herself. She pushed through the snow to the last house on the village street, where the road dipped down a long hill, and the wide arc of northern mountains was revealed in a glittering rampart. Her eyes filled involuntarily with tears.
"I must be very weak," she said to herself, "to cry because it's beautiful!" And sitting down on a rock by the road, she cried more, with a feeling of self-pity and a little self-contempt. An old woman came to the door of the house she had just passed with a dish-pan of water and looked curiously at the stranger. At first the countrywoman opened her lips as if she intended to speak, but stood with her dish-pan and said nothing. Isabelle could see through her tears the bent figure and battered face of the old woman,—a being without one line of beauty or even animal grace. What a fight life must have been to reduce any woman's body to that! And the purpose,—to keep the breath of life in a worn old body, just to live?
"Pleasant morning!" Isabelle said with a smile through her tears.
"It ain't bad," the old woman admitted, emptying her dish-pan.
As Isabelle retraced her steps into the village the old woman followed her with curious eyes, thinking no doubt that a woman like this stranger, well dressed, young, and apparently well fed, ought not to be sitting on a rock on a winter's day crying!
"And she's quite right!" Isabelle said to herself.