Brander had turned abruptly and was stalking towards his chaise. Once only he looked back over his shoulder, and then there was no expression on his face but a smile; but that Mr. Tuke would have given a dozen rubies to obliterate with a bullet. CHAPTER XXXIV. For all the starkness of frost that now befell, it was not till the early days of February that the packed heavens began to discharge themselves of the congested stores of snow they had been long garnering. By then the ground was iron a foot deep; the last green thing was withered upon itself; dead birds hung in the hedgerows and rabbits were stuck stiff in their burrows. Familiar presentments of trees and buildings offered strange new aspects as seen from the middle of frozen ponds, and the very least sap of nature was so withdrawn as that it seemed a marvel the principle of life could endure, to hug itself with any promise of spring. But to our gentleman waking one morning, there was earnest of the first white fall outside in the wan light struck rigidly from the ceiling. He rose and went to the window, and saw the cold sheet spread, pure and beautiful and hiding all his world; and at that he knew himself committed to such a prolonged hob-nobbing with his _lares_ as he had never before experienced. He was hardly discomfited. This prospective imprisonment carried with it a picture of home occupations very peaceful and unvexed. Sheltered from the wind, he would study to make of himself a shepherd beloved of his flock. A vision of a sombre library, full of serious warmth and winking book-backs, with himself a quiet dreaming student, in the dusk afternoons, set in the midst, appealed pleasantly to his mind’s eye. It should be a period of pregnant repose, while thought and virtue should grow large within him and induce him to a nobler attitude towards life. In the modest enthusiasm engendered of this prospect, he even wished it would snow ever more and more, until he and his were shut in beyond a last chance of present rescue; and if the desire proved him less foreseeing from the domestic point of view than he would have imagined, it did, at least, most fully avouch his honesty of purpose. Since his return he had rather courted seclusion; nor had he gone much abroad, nor--be it marked--ventured within the radiated influence of the “First Inn.” He had, in consequence, no personal knowledge of those movements of Mr. Brander that were subsequent to his interview with him; but he kept Dennis, to whom he had given his confidence in the matter, on the alert, and that good serving-man reported that no information was in the neighbourhood of any recrudescence of blackguardism on the part of the “Dog and Duck.” Therefore he was fain to hope that the baffled ex-schoolmaster had for the time being succumbed to circumstance and withdrawn himself as he came.