At length his sense of protection returned; dizzily he leaned back, unstrung, and yet satisfied. The night noises pulsed a rhythm fuller, more harmoniously triumphant with soft surges of loving certainty, than he had ever felt; the pandering darkness was intimate and confidential. With the slowing of the unleashed leap of his blood, recollections of Louise Richard came, as he had once feared; but there was no conflict, no sense of soilure, in the unreal, remote fantasy of the former passion; only a sun-high glory and delight in this, as if the first had been the needed soil in which the plant of love could grow toward fulfillment. Her ears caught his contented whisper. "What are a thousand defeats, Jane ... loved one ... when there is this at the end of the way?" "At the beginning of our new way," she amended with sober joy. "It wipes out all the irks and littlenesses.... Under all our veneer and varnish of culture, business, politics, we are man and woman ... male and female ... our souls as nakedly desirous as were the first two who mated.... Loved one!" It rendered him inarticulate, this delicious stirring up of the hidden deeps. It was for this, he was sure, that men and women had been molded; in this surrender they yielded themselves to the ageless currents of joy-bringing unity that created life, and continued it as life itself. "I love your hair," she arranged it more to her liking. "It fretted your eyes, that last speech.... I wanted to kiss it away ... then." XXI Three weeks after the election, the cold set in. As if to compensate for the maddening torridity of July and August, the biting tail of a snowstorm lashed bleakly over Adamsville. The white flakes danced wildly along the exposed crest of the mountain, stinging summer-seasoned skins. Blasts whistled and shrieked, piling the chill drifts along the rutty streets of Hewintown, sifting through sacks roofing the gaps in the shack shingles. Then a day of thaw, deepening the roads into a cold slushiness; and that night a downburst of rain and hail, that cased trees, shrubs, hill-paths in a glittering coating of ice. The brittle walks cut into feet whose shoes lacked soling, the slippery steeps flung weakened women and men against pointed rocks, adding to the already over-worked Charities the chill cruelties of winter. "Where's your overcoat, Ben, in this weather?" Pelham asked Wilson, now out on bail, as they passed on the stiffened sidewalks. "Ain't got none, Mr. Judson. An' the wife's down with the T. B., an' no blankets in the house." "I've got an extra coat; come on in to the office.... I'll phone Miss Lauderdale about your people before we go to town." "There's hundreds like us; you know charity can't stretch very far. What these boys need is justice." Pelham marveled at the untaught vision that could broaden its individual suffering into universal understanding.