All the morning he had been moving his mind in slow waves that did not seem like thoughts against the rock of death; but he came away from the tiger-skins and the flickering laughter of Dr. Gurnet's eyes with a comfortable sense of having left all such questions on the doorstep. He thought instead of whether it was worth while to go down to the rink before lunch or not. It was while he was still undecided as to this question that he heard a little shriek of laughter. It ran up a scale like three notes on a flute; he knew in a moment that it was the same laughter he had listened to the night before. He turned aside and found himself at the bend of a long ice run leading down to the lake. A group of men were standing there, and with one foot on a toboggan, her head flung back, her eyes full of sparkling mischief, was the child. He forgot that he had ever thought her a boy, though she looked on the whole as if she would like to be thought one. Her curly auburn hair was short and very thick, and perched upon it was a round scarlet cap; her mouth was scarlet; her eyes were like Scotch braes, brown and laughing; the curves of her long, delicate lips ran upward; her curving thin, black eyebrows were like question-marks; her chin was tilted upward like the petal of a flower. She was very slim, and wore a very short brown skirt which revealed the slenderest of feet and ankles; a sweater clung to her unformed, lithe little figure. She had an air of pointed sharpness and firmness like a lifted sword. She might have been sixteen, though she was, as a matter of fact, three years older; but she was not so much an age as a sensation--the sensation of youth, incredibly arrogant and unharmed. The men were trying to dissuade her from the run. It had just been freshly iced; the long blue line of it curved as hard as iron in and out under banks of ice far down into the valley. A tall boy beside her, singularly like her in features and coloring, but weaker in fiber and expression, said querulously: "Don't go and make a fool of yourself, Claire. It's a man's run, not a girl's. I won't have you do it." It was the fatal voice of authority without power. Across the group her eyes met Winn's; wicked and gay they ran over him and into him. He stuck his hands into his pockets and stared back at her grimly, like a Staines. He wasn't going to say anything; only if she had belonged to him he would have stopped her. His eyes said he could have stopped her; but she didn't belong to him, so he set his square jaw, and gave her his unflinching, indifferent disapproval. She appeared after this to be unaware of him, and turned to her brother. "Won't have it?" she said, with a little gurgle of laughter. "Why, how do you suppose you can stop me? There's only one way of keeping a man's run for men, and that's for girls not to be able to use it--see!"