Into the golden sunlight fell the clashing of morning sleighbells describing the outdoor world. Listening to them she felt the vast surroundings that lately had become a setting, owing part of its entrancement to the delightful sense of success in a charming social atmosphere, re-asserting themselves in their own right, accusing her of neglect, showing the days winding themselves off to an end that would leave her in possession only of the valley road and the fields beyond the bridge. The dawn had wakened to remind her. Watching the coming of the light she had been restored to her first communion with it, back in the time when the people downstairs had seemed superfluity, thrown in with the rest. When all was over they would appear in the distance: bright figures of a momentary widening of her social horizon, unforgotten, but withdrawn into their own element; not going forward into her life as this winter paradise would go forward, brightening her days with the possibility of reunion. This morning she would break the snare, be a claimant for a lunch packet, an absentee for the whole day. With the coming of the far-off afternoon, Guerini, looking down from his window on to the promontory either to escape or to claim her company, would find no one there. * * * * * Even in terror there was gladness of swift movement that left her pressed like a niched effigy into the wall of the drift as the beast pranced by, revealing in its wake a slouching peasant; clear brilliant eyes brooding amidst unkempt shagginess, pipe at an angle of jaunty defiance to the steep his heedless tramping brought so near. She was honourably plastered with snow and the precious package that had leapt and might have hurled itself into the void was still safely on its string about her neck, but the narrow rising path bereft of its secrecy by evidence of homely levels above of field and farm was perhaps only a highway for humiliating perils. More cows might be coming round the bend; a whole herd. There might be—it would harmonise with the way life always seemed to respond to deliberate activity with a personal challenge—on this very day the dawn had drawn her away from beaten tracks, a general turning out of cattle for an airing; mountain cattle, prancing like colts. Man and cow were now upon the widening path, approaching the sloping field with the barn at the end, the cow trotting swiftly ahead, through the half buried posts beside the sunken open gate, and now careering hither and thither with flying tail, the powdery snow flung in wreaths about its course. It was half mad of course, poor thing, with the joy of release from one of those noisome steamy sheds whose reek polluted the air surrounding them and saddened the landscape with reminder of the price of happiness: oblivion of hidden, helpless suffering.