It came to her like a solution of all her troubles; it was so placid, so still, so cold. A moment and all would be forgotten. She stood with one foot on the creaking ice. It was but to walk a dozen steps to the place where the ice was but a crash of crystal and that would end it all. She was so weary of the eternal strife of things, she was so glad to lay down the burden under which her back was bending to the point of breaking. And yet, there was the primitive instinct of self-preservation combating her inclination, urging her on to make one more final effort. Back and forth, through the snow about the lake she wandered; without being able to decide. Her strength was fast ebbing. Which--which, should it be? "God have mercy!" she cried, and fell unconscious. CHAPTER XVII. THE NIGHT IN THE SNOWSTORM. "Announced by all the trumpets of the sky, Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields, Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air Hides hills and woods, the river and the heaven."--_Emerson_. All through that long, wild night David searched and shouted, to find only snow and silence. Through the darkness and the falling flakes he could not see more than a foot ahead, and when he would stumble over a stone or the fallen trunk of a tree, he would stoop down and search through the drifts with his bare hands, thinking perhaps that she might have fallen, and not finding her, he would again take up his fruitless search, while cold fear gnawed at his heart. At home in the warm farm house, sat the Squire who had done his duty. The consciousness of having done it, however, did not fill him with that cheerful glow of righteousness that is the reward of a good conscience--on the contrary, he felt small. It might have been imagination, but he felt, somehow, as if his wife and Kate were shunning him. Once he had tried to take his wife's hand as she stood with her face pressed to the window trying to see if she could make out the dim outline of David returning with Anna, but she withdrew her hand impatiently as she had never done in the thirty years of their married life. Amasy's hardness was a thing no longer to be condoned. Furthermore, when the clock had struck eleven and then twelve, and yet no sign of David or Anna, the Squire had reached for his fur cap and announced his intention of "going to look for 'em." But like the proverbial worm, the wife of his bosom had turned, and with all the determination of a white rabbit she announced: "If I was you, Amasy, I'd stay to hum; seems as if you had made almost enough trouble for one day." With the old habit of authority, strong as ever, he looked at the worm, but there was a light in its eyes that warned him as a danger signal.