But ’twas beautiful, just the same, all shimmering cold blue, and white like apple blossoms that have blanched and are ready to fall. And there was mile upon mile of it. It was wondrously fine, finer than anything Andy had done until then. It was really his master-bit, as he had said it would be. And he would have kept on and woven more, but—
He looked of a sudden out his window, one morning, in the gray, and he could not see that Summer anywhere!
He went to the door and shaded his eyes with his hands and peered over miles and miles of hills; and far down one gusset of valley he saw her dull-green robes a-trailing. He cried for joy. (You know—when you have lost a thing that you loved and found it again.)
Famished and weak he was, but he gathered the miles and pounds of that shroud in his arms and started down the roads and over the hills after her, calling till his heart would break and his voice went dry:
“Wait for me, lass. I’ve woven your shroud! Wait for me, lass. I’m coming! I’ve your beautiful, downy shroud here—”
And he would stumble along, so weak the sweat broke out on him and he scarce could lift a leg. But with the shroud over his arm, he went on and on and on as best he could; his long, ragged gray hair a-flying and a wild glare in his eyes and those eyes fast fixed on the Summer as she slipped away.
’Twas in this fashion he came to the summit of a foothill and could go no further. The cold had smitten to his bones, though the sweat still stood on his skin. He dropped down on the ground and slept a bit—but not sound asleep, and in his sleep he had awful dreams which made him wake.
He started up, crying weakly: “I have your shroud, lass. Wait for me!”
And then he noticed—It was snowing!
The soft white flakes he saw, dropping upon the earth like light years, my boy, years that themselves will be dropping and dropping forever and ever by tens of hundreds of thousands of millions and covering everything, all we do, all we are or were, far and wide with a white sameness—a big mound here where a Hero Worked, a flatness there where a zero worked—but all white, and all the same.