The weather broke at last. One might say it smashed itself over their heads. There came an afternoon darkness swift and sudden, a wild gale and an icy sleet that gave place in the night to snow, so that Trafford looked out next morning to see a maddening chaos of small white flakes, incredibly swift, against something that was neither darkness nor light. Even with the door but partly ajar a cruelty of cold put its claw within, set everything that was moveable swaying and clattering, and made Marjorie hasten shuddering to heap fresh logs upon the fire. Once or twice Trafford went out to inspect tent and roof and store-shed, several times wrapped to the nose he battled his way for fresh wood, and for the rest of the blizzard they kept to the hut. It was slumberously stuffy, but comfortingly full of flavours of tobacco and food. There were two days of intermission and a day of gusts and icy sleet again, turning with one extraordinary clap of thunder to a wild downpour of dancing lumps of ice, and then a night when it seemed all Labrador, earth and sky together, was in hysterical protest against inconceivable wrongs. And then the break was over; the annual freezing-up was accomplished, winter had established itself, the snowfall moderated and ceased, and an ice-bound world shone white and sunlit under a cloudless sky. § 3 Through all that time they got no further with the great discussion for which they had faced that solitude. They attempted beginnings. "Where had we got to when we left England?" cried Marjorie. "You couldn't work, you couldn't rest--you hated our life." "Yes, I know. I had a violent hatred of the lives we were leading. I thought--we had to get away. To think.... But things don't leave us alone here." He covered his face with his hands. "Why did we come here?" he asked. "You wanted--to get out of things." "Yes. But with you.... Have we, after all, got out of things at all? I said coming up, perhaps we were leaving our own problem behind. In exchange for other problems--old problems men have had before. We've got nearer necessity; that's all. Things press on us just as much. There's nothing more fundamental in wild nature, nothing profounder--only something earlier. One doesn't get out of life by going here or there.... But I wanted to get you away--from all things that had such a hold on you.... "When one lies awake at nights, then one seems to get down into things...." He went to the door, opened it, and stood looking out. Against a wan daylight the snow was falling noiselessly and steadily. "Everything goes on," he said.... "Relentlessly...." § 4 That was as far as they had got when the storms ceased and they came out again into an air inexpressibly fresh and sharp and sweet, and into a world blindingly clean and golden white under the rays of the morning sun.