After crossing an especially slippery bit she paused to rest for a moment, supporting herself by the rough fence of split rails that made a barrier between the road edge and the rocky bank which fell away, at first sharply, and then more gradually toward the Moosatuk. As she stood there, looking up and down, the saying came forcibly to her, “Whosoever loves the land in February, loves for life.” Did she love nature, or was she only baffled and cowed by its omnipotence and bent to it by the force of necessity? This day she herself could not have judged. All the sources of inspiration seemed closed. Silence reigned in the River Kingdom; the voice of the ruler was stilled. Great, sooty crows, lean and ravenous, patrolled the river meadows, croaking ominously as they quarried a meal from the frozen wild apples, or rent asunder the few blighted ears that remained in the corn-fields. The day before had been one of sleet and wind; no human being had even passed the homestead—merely a brindled cat of the half-wild breed, and he had scuttled along on the other side of the road under cover of the wall. Robert Stead was ill of a sudden cold, Adam had reported when he returned from his daily lessons, consequently José, the Mexican half-breed factotum, had not left the shack even to fetch the mail. Thinner than when she had come to Gilead a month before, Brooke’s supple figure had the spring and elasticity of physical health in spite of its lack of roundness, for the long nights of sleep and the simplicity of the daily routine offset the strain of unaccustomed toil. Neither was she lonely in the common meaning of the word, which always implies a great degree of leisure; also she was young, and Bulwer was right—“The young are never lonely.” Then there were the books that the silent man brought her—poetry, story, and all the lore of her fellows, the birds and beasts of the field, that heretofore had been to her unknown creatures of mystery; while Adam (she had never called him the Cub since the night of his return) and she had many new sympathies, and when the boy, inspired by the talk of his teacher, rushed in to tell her of the track that he thought perhaps might belong to a fox or a mink, or with the surmise that a strange bird was feeding by the granary, she was as eager as he to see and to prove it. The grisly mood that had seized upon her this 12th day of February was born of the sudden stepping into the foreground of the future with all its necessities, which, until that moment, had been blended optimistically with the middle distance at the very least.