applied a very superior brain to the sport, he not unnaturally came off best man; but this he did not realize, and he embraced his canoe that night in a glow of complete happiness. He had named her after his favorite girl in history, and he loved her with his first boyish passion. VI Fessenden shivered and sat up in bed. It was the first time he had ever heard sounds in the house at this hour, and even the birds and the cocks were still asleep. He felt more oppressed than curious, and, dressing hastily, opened his window and slipped out upon the veranda. The moon shone on vast fields of ice and snow, on white peaks sharply defined against the dark starry sky, on great stretches of woods whose heavy spruce and naked maples were laden and glittering. The lake was a sheet of ice several feet in depth. Fessenden had driven a team across it yesterday to the opposite woods, where the men were chopping trees blown down in a recent storm. The thermometer was very low, but the air so still that the cold had no sting in it. Without the house the world might have been dead; but not so within. Several people seemed to be moving about in a curious and stealthy manner. Suddenly some one ran down the hall and back again. Immediately after there was a scream from Christina, followed by a silence so sudden and complete that it seemed profounder than that without. How he realized at once that Mrs. Nettlebeck was dead he never knew. She had not been a strong woman for years, and had spent more and more of her time in the big rocking-chair, looking out on the lake or reading her Bible; but when he had kissed her as usual the night before, she had prodded him playfully in search of damaged bones, and told him in her broken English that she forgot she was too old to work while she watched him skate and turn somersaults on the ice. Fessenden knew that she loved him more than she did her own children, for he interested her and they did not, and he showed her much demonstrative affection, which they thought beneath their religiously acquired Americanism--if indeed there were any impulses left in those dry economical natures. And now Fessenden looked about vaguely as if in search of the fleeing spirit. For the moment it seemed to him that he vibrated in unison with the great forces beyond the Universe. It was several days before he was conscious of grief and his loss, but he tingled with cosmic curiosity.