She knew she was making a desperate venture, but she said to herself, bitterly, that desperate emergencies require desperate remedies. With infinite care and patience she managed to get hold of the strong matted vines, and swung herself carefully over the trellis, beginning to make the perilous descent with bated breath, for a fall might mean a broken limb, or, at the least, a sprained ankle. The wet snow clung to her face and garments and chilled her to the bone; but she persevered, though the high wind threatened to loosen her hold and blow her down every instant. What did she care for it all, poor Cinthia fleeing from her dull life and her hated persecutors to the tender arms of love? She would endure anything rather than be cheated of her happiness. The cold snow flecked her benumbed face and hands, the high wind swung her light form to and fro like a flower upon the vine, her breath seemed to freeze on her lips, but her courage never flagged. Out there in the night and the storm her lover was waiting. The thought kept her young heart warm. She was more than half-way down now, and the wind began to lull. Courage, Cinthia; the danger will soon be over, sweetheart, and love rewarded for its brave struggles. But, alas! how often bathos overcomes pathos. Cinthia was only a girl, after all, with the usual feminine attributes. As she swung herself carefully from branch to branch of the vine, hoping and longing for her feet to touch _terra firma_, yet sustained by unfaltering courage, there came to her a sudden wild and terrifying thought that made the blood run colder in her veins than all the raging storm had force to do. She had remembered that of late the immense vine to which she clung had afforded a delightful gymnasium for a score or so of large rodents, causing her aunt to threaten to cut it down. The feminine mind has one idiosyncrasy known of all men, and accordingly ridiculed, but never overcome. Cinthia did not pretend to be stronger than her sex. With that sudden terrifying thought an uncontrollable shriek burst from her lips, her numb hands relaxed their grasp, and she went crashing down through space plump into a great, great bank of drifted snow blown into a heap below the vine. Everard Dawn heard that shriek as he tossed on his pillow in restless dreams, and suddenly raised his head. “What a night!” he cried, for he had been watching the storm ere he retired. “How the wind howls to-night, shrieking like a human voice through that splendid pine on the corner! How I used to love the wind in the pines in my far Southern home until--_afterward_! But since then it is an embodied grief to me, as in the plaint of one of our Southern poets: “‘I hear the wind in the pines With its soughing of wordless woe, And the whisper of leafless vines, Like a sad heart’s overflow. Sigh on! they seem to say, Sigh on, sad heart, to the night, For the world is cold and gray, And life has no delight.’”