A tearing, howling wind from the north--from the boundless snow-clad plains of Russia that lie between the Neva and the Yellow Sea; a gray sky washed over as with a huge brush dipped in dirty whitening; and the plains of Tver a spotless, dazzling level of snow. The snow was falling softly and steadily, falling, as it never falls in England, in little more than fine powder, with a temperature forty degrees below freezing-point. A drift--constant, restless, never altering--sped over the level plain like the dust on a high-road before a steady wind. This white scud--a flying scud of frozen water--was singularly like the scud that is blown from the crest of the waves by a cyclone in the China Seas. Any object that broke the wind--a stunted pine, a broken tree-trunk, a Government road-post--had at its leeward side a high, narrow snow-drift tailing off to the dead level of the plain. Where the wind dropped the snow rose at once. But these objects were few and far between. The deadly monotony of the scene--the trackless level, the preposterous dimensions of the plain, the sense of distance that is conveyed only by the steppe and the great desert of Gobi when the snow lies on it--all these tell the same grim truth to all who look on them: the old truth that man is but a small thing and his life but as the flower of the grass. Across the plain of Tver, before the north wind, a single sleigh was tearing as fast as horse could lay hoof to ground--a sleigh driven by Paul Howard Alexis, and the track of it was as a line drawn from point to point across a map. A striking feature of the winter of Northern Russia is the glorious uncertainty of its snowfalls. At Tver the weather-wise had said: "The snow has not all fallen yet. More is coming. It is yellow in the sky, although March is nearly gone." The landlord of the hotel (a good enough resting-place facing the broad Volga) had urged upon M. le Prince the advisability of waiting, as is the way of landlords all the world over. But Etta had shown a strange restlessness, a petulant desire to hurry forward at all risks. She hated Tver; the hotel was uncomfortable, there was an unhealthy smell about the place. Paul acceded readily enough to her wishes. He rather liked Tver. In a way he was proud of this busy town--a centre of Russian civilization. He would have liked Etta to be favorably impressed with it, as any prejudice would naturally reflect upon Osterno, 140 miles across the steppe. But with a characteristic silent patience he made the necessary preparations for an immediate start.