Word by word she pieced together the story she had heard and tried to give it a meaning. A man pursued upon the mountain road and another following him! Then a loud cry heard by several people, and the belief, expressed openly, that murder had been done. Shrinking from her own dread of a terrible truth, she could not quiet the voice which told her that there was but one man at Vermala in whom, the probabilities being considered, the police might be interested—and that man, her husband, Luton! Why, the whole trend of his life pointed to such an end as this. And she had feared and dreamed of it since the day she first learned to know him and to realise the tragedy of her own fate. The end would come before all the world, she had said—and the day of it was at hand! She put the letter into the blotting book, and went to the window again. The lanterns were no longer to be seen, and the night had come down with a darkness so intense that even the nearer slopes were invisible. Shut from her eyes, the hidden woods were revealed to a keen imagination which filled them with alien figures, searching here and there for a truth which must so alter her own life (if such a truth existed) that hereafter the whole world would hardly offer her a harbourage from the shame of it. As in a vision, she saw the dead man lying there, deep in the snow, and the white flakes falling anew upon his face. A glow from a lantern searched it out, and declared the horror of the secret. And up there at the hotel another waited, dreading the instant of discovery—perchance preparing already for flight in the hope that discovery might never come.