The snow might fall now to the end of time. It would creep up and up, falling from the heavens, rising from the earth, swallowing all creation--the end of the world. He pressed into the park and there under the trees stretching like gallows against the throttling sky temptation to give it all up, to go under and have done with it all, leapt, hot and fierce, upon him. Mrs. Pont and the others were waiting for him. They would be good to him. The Upper World would not hear nor see nor think of his disasters, and slowly, with the others, life would recede, he would crumble and decay and cease to care, and death would come soon enough. Then the wind smote his face and tore at his coat: the snow died away, beyond the black bare trees a very faint yellow bar threaded the thick grey--promise that the storm was at an end. Suddenly with the cessation of the storm the long field of white seemed good and restful, and beyond the park the houses showed light in their windows. The yellow spread through the sky, and stars, very slowly, came and the wind died away. Courage filled him. Rachel might never come or write or care, but he would make the thought of her the one true thing in his heart, and with that he would do battle so long as he could. Christopher and Miss Rand ... he thought of them as he trudged his way home--and when he saw the white silence of Saxton Square and the golden sky breaking above its peace and quiet he thought that, for a time longer, he would keep his place and hold his own. CHAPTER II A LITTLE HOUSE "Each in the crypt would cry, 'But one freezes here! and why? 'When a heart, as chill, 'At my own would thrill Back to life, and its fires out-fly? 'Heart, shall we live or die? The rest ... settle by-and-by!'" ROBERT BROWNING. I Rachel at Seddon Court watched, from her window, that first fallen snow. Seddon Court is about three miles from the town of Lewes and lies, tucked and cornered, under the very brow of the Downs. It is a grey little house, old and stalwart, with a courtyard and two towers. The towers are Norman; the rest of the house is Tudor. Beyond the actual building there are gardens that run to the very foot of the Downs, with only a patch and an old stone wall intervening. Above the house, day and night, year after year, the Downs are bending; everything, beneath their steady solemn gaze, is small and restless; as the colours are flung by the sun across their green sprawling limbs the house, at their feet, catches their reflected smile and, when the sun is gone and the winds blow, cowers beneath their frown; everything in that house is conscious of their presence. Rachel had been at Seddon Court for a month and now, at the window of her writing-room, looking across the garden, up into their dark shadows, she wondered at their indifference and monotony. Anyone who had known her before her marriage would be struck instantly, on seeing her now, by a change in her.