But no one moved. Even the shadows were still, frozen to the snow. Not an owl hunted; not a field mouse scuttered. The moon seemed not to budge. She was but a spot of glare ice on a sky tingling with stars.
The room was dead with old air. Yet his brow burned. He flung up the window and gulped the fresh wind that flowed in. The jar of the casement shook down snow and it sifted across the sill to the carpet.
On his sleeve a few flakes rested and did not melt. Their patterns caught his attention. The wonder of snow engaged his idle mind.
The air had been clear. And then suddenly there was snow. Out of nothing these little masterworks of crystal jewelry had been created, infinitesimal architecture beyond the skill of the Venetian glass-spinners or the Turkish weavers of silver.
And now the flakes were blinking out, back into nothingness.
The snow had come from nowhere in armies. Each flake was an entity, unlike any other flake. And then the air had recalled it!
This baby that was arriving was but another snowflake. It would come from nowhere—or from where? Whither would it go if it died? For die it must, sooner or later. Invisible, visible, invisible!
What was the soul? what was the body? Who decreed these existences? How could any imaginable god find the time, the patience, the interest to build every snowflake, sketch every leaf, decide the race, the hue, the figure of every animal, bird in egg, child in woman?
Was it to be a girl or a boy that Immy would produce? No one could know in advance. Yet it meant everything to the soul crowded into the body.
If this human snowflake had been taken from a waiting multitude of unborn angels, why had God sentenced this particular soul to life imprisonment in this particular child of dishonor? What mischief had it done in heaven to be sentenced to earth? Could it be true, as Dr. Chirnside preached, that this soul had been elected from the beginning of the world to unending damnation or unending rapture for the “glory” of God? What a fearful idea of glory! The worst Hun in history, the most merciless inquisitor, had never equaled that scheme of “glory.”