As for Reuben, he was no way broken. The fierce, cold wind of remorse and grief for others had bent him level with the ground, but could not break him; for a man’s character rides always high, as the stars do, above the moment’s weather. To-morrow he would take up his work, with a still firmer hand, maybe, than before; to-morrow he would find his way again to Ghyll, enticed there by a face not young at all, a face on which grief and weather between them had traced strange patterns. There was real tenderness at the heart of this man who had shown so many faces to the world, and Widow Mathewson had chosen a good son, after all, on whom to lean. At dusk of the same day, as Gaunt was dragging his tired feet through the drift that lay between the road and his own garden fence, the evening mail came into Garth. Instead of three horses, there were four, and they were sending clouds of steam down the tracks of the frosty wind. Will the Driver pulled up at the cottage which served Garth as post-office and shop of all trades. His hands were chilled stiff as the beads of foam on the harness, but his laugh was warm as ever when Daniel, the postmaster, came out from selling a penn’orth of toffee to receive Her Majesty’s mail. “Not snowed up yet?” asked Daniel, shivering a little in the wind. “No. No, Daniel. Not just yet. You’re the ninety-and-ninth that has asked me that question along the road, and I’m fair tired of answering. We’ve kept a way open somehow, but durned if we can hold out against another fall. Gee-up, Captain! Your hoofs are balled under with snow, and my hands and feet are as cold as a jilted lass, but Her Majesty wouldn’t like us to be much later than we are already. Gee-up, Captain!” His cattle were getting fairly under way by the time he reached Widow Lister’s door. He had hoped for once to escape the plump little woman whose only business in life was to stop busy men on the highway; yet he pulled up, with weary deference to habit, as he saw her lying in wait. “So you’re not snowed in yet?” she asked. Her slanting glance, over-coy for her years, the sleek, well-fed look of the woman, found the secret corner where Will kept his temper hidden. “You’re the hundredth,” he snapped, “and I knew I’d find the last straw nigh your door, or thereabouts. Seems to me you keep a stack of such-like straws. What is it, Widow? We’re late, and Captain is as cross as ever I saw a horse in my long time of driving.” “Nay, ’tis the Captain’s master that’s cross. Shame on ye, Will, to be grumbling at such weather as God sends. Who are we to grumble?” Will waited in exasperation. The widow was “nimble as a weathercock,” as he put it to himself, “and could always place a right-thinking man in the wrong.” “What is it now?” he repeated. “Oh, don’t be getting impatient. I only asked if ye were snowed up, or not. Surely a civil body can ask a civil question.”