At midnight there had been a moon, but before dawn snow came, a great, gray, shimmering gloom drifting through the vague world. The dry leaves shivered and crackled in the wind as the myriad flakes came sweeping down, ribbing the boughs and the curved fronds of the bracken, piling itself amid the moss at the roots of great trees, and scudding over the open lands with a fierce, withering haste that left the grass tussocks white like stones catching foam from a rushing stream. The dawn came as a mere grayness, with a flocculent, drifting chaos of snow in the air, and a bite in the northwest wind that sent spikelets of ice bearding the fringes of ponds and ditches. * * * * * Now Mrs. Winnie had been awake most of the night, and had risen very early full of an instinct that strange things were about to happen, what with such a storm of snow the first week in November. She had lit the fire in the kitchen and was standing at the window watching the snow come down when she heard a horse neigh in the stable, as though the beast had caught the sound of a comrade’s coming. And, sure enough, through the maze of snow she saw something dark draw up toward the gate, and knew in her heart that John Gore had returned. Going to the door, she lifted the bar and saw the snow come whirling in with a hungry wind that went deep into her bosom. There was the click of the gate, and a man came up the path between the drooping stocks and the withered, swaying rose-bushes with something wrapped in a cloak lying in his arms. Mrs. Winnie went out to meet him, her woman’s nature caught by the spell of such a love tale. “Mrs. Winnie!” “Thank God, sir, and you have brought her back.” The breast of his coat was white with snow, for he had wrapped both the cloaks about Barbara to keep her warm. And he looked down anxiously at the face that lay against his shoulder, as though he feared that the cold had gone to her heart. “We lost our way, and only luck helped us back again. A warm fire, Mrs. Winnie; she is half frozen.” Christopher Jennifer’s wife had taken a sly peep at this desired one, but she was as brisk and concerned as John Gore was, and not a woman to talk and dally. “Come in, sir, out of this wind; it bites into the blood of the child. Such a storm, with autumn only half out of the door! Let me have her, sir; I know what the cold be on these Sussex hills.” John Gore carried Barbara into the kitchen, for he had ridden with her in his arms to keep her warm, guiding his nag with a touch of the knee. She had fallen asleep with weariness and the cold—a dazed, numb sleep that was not pleasant to consider. Her lips were white and her hands like ice, so that she looked more like a sleeping snow-maiden than a living girl.