“Hello. It’s morning. This is my day off, Anne, and I’m going for a long walk up towards Scarborough. If you want to slip out with me and walk too, nobody would know, it’s so early, and then you could get back to college this afternoon, couldn’t you? Want to do that?” “But when did you get up? Have you had your breakfast? You’re a good bedfellow, Ariel. You didn’t stir all night.” “Well, neither did you, or I wasn’t awake to know if you did. I had breakfast with Grandam. But I haven’t told her that you’re here, since you asked me not to. Rose maneuvered this tray for me. She’s a good sport, isn’t she! Grandam is too. She must wonder who came to the door last night.” “You’re a good sport yourself now that we’re on the subject, Ariel. A darned good one.... Many thanks.” It was still snowing. But one couldn’t believe in the reality of it, somehow: April was so close behind. This was a mere flurry in her face, ephemeral. The whole landscape was ablow with snow clusters, like flowers, like the flowers on Grandam’s curtains masking the night from her room. So this flower-blowing-curtain shut out spring. Why Anne was pushing her way through this dream of snow blobs, shoulder to shoulder with Ariel, on a tramp up the Post Road, she hardly knew. It was Ariel’s will that was motivating her, perhaps. She felt that Ariel’s will—or somebody’s, not her own anyway—had steered even her dreams last night. And hadn’t Ariel undressed her, and brushed her hair and put her to bed like a baby? Anne thought that she had. And she was still giving the same sort of service. For the first hour, or more, the girls scarcely spoke. Anne did at one time call, “Wait a minute, Ariel. I’ve got snow in my ankle.” And Ariel, who had not noticed that Anne had dropped back, turned and retraced her steps to her. And soon after that Ariel had exclaimed, “There’s a wood road! Look how the boughs are tangled over it. It’s like a white cloister! Where do you suppose it goes?” They had followed it, thrilled, up hill through woods until it ended in a high meadow of trackless snow. It may have disappointed Ariel, that snow meadow, after the mysterious woods, but it brought a kind of psychic relief to Anne. Its bare expanse simplified her, was the last touch to Ariel’s own simplifying influence. Silently, with something of the snow’s own silence, they returned to the road and trudged on and on, like two sturdy ponies.