Again she held out her hands as for a friendly greeting, and again I took her into my arms, this time with all the desperation of impending loss, for I was filled with a sense of certainties against which it was useless to struggle, and felt as if by instinct that she would leave despite all I could do or say. But I did not realize quite how near the moment was. Slipping from my clasp, she flitted to the door, forcing it slightly open, so that the moaning and howling of the gale became suddenly accentuated. "Until the spring!" she cried, in mournful tones that seemed in accord with the tumult of the elements. "Until the spring!"--And a smile of boundless yearning and compassion glimmered across her face. Then the door rattled to a close, and I stood alone in that chilly room. Blindly, like one bereft of his senses, I plunged out of the cabin, regardless of the gale, regardless of the snow that came wheeling down in dizzy flurries. But Yasma was not to be seen. For a moment I stood staring into the storm; then time after time I called out her name, to be answered only by the wind that sneered and snorted its derision. And at length, warmed into furious action, I set out at a sprint for her cabin, racing along unconscious of the buffeting blast and the beaten snow that pricked and stung my face. All in vain! Arriving at Yasma's home, I flung open the great pine door without ceremony--to be greeted by the emptiness within. For many minutes I waited; but Yasma did not come, and the tempest shrieked and chuckled more fiendishly than ever. At last, when the early twilight was dimming the world, I threaded a path back along the whitening ground, and among cabins with roofs like winter. Not a living being greeted me; and through the wide-open windows of the huts I had glimpses of naked and untenanted logs. II _Blossom and Seed_ CHAPTER XI _THE PRISONER_ When I staggered back to my cabin through the snow-storm in the November dusk, I could not realize the ghastliness of my misfortune. My mind seemed powerless before the bleak reality; it was not until I had re-entered the cabin that I began to look the terror in the face. Then, when I had slammed the door behind me and stood silently in that frigid place, all my dread and loneliness and foreboding became concentrated in one point of acute agony. The shadows deepening within that dingy hovel seemed living, evil things; the wind that hissed and screeched without, with brief lulls and swift crescendos of fury, was like a chorus of demons; and such desolation of spirit was upon me that I could have rushed out into the storm, and delivered myself up to its numbing, fatal embrace.