You're a child of the snow, I
swear. Let me come up--closer--to see your face--and touch your little
hand." Her laughter answered him. "Come on! A little higher. Here we're quite alone together." "It's magnificent," he cried. "But why did you hide away so long? I've
looked and searched for you in vain ever since we skated--" he was going
to say "ten days ago," but the accurate memory of time had gone from
him; he was not sure whether it was days or years or minutes. His
thoughts of earth were scattered and confused. "You looked for me in the wrong places," he heard her murmur just above
him. "You looked in places where I never go. Hotels and houses kill me. I avoid them." She laughed--a fine, shrill, windy little laugh. "I loathe them too--"

He stopped. The girl had suddenly come quite close. A breath of ice
passed through his very soul. She had touched him. "But this awful cold!" he cried out, sharply, "this freezing cold that
takes me. The wind is rising; it's a wind of ice. Come, let us turn ...!" But when he plunged forward to hold her, or at least to look, the girl
was gone again. And something in the way she stood there a few feet
beyond, and stared down into his eyes so steadfastly in silence, made
him shiver. The moonlight was behind her, but in some odd way he could
not focus sight upon her face, although so close. The gleam of eyes he
caught, but all the rest seemed white and snowy as though he looked
beyond her--out into space.... The sound of the church bell came up faintly from the valley far below,
and he counted the strokes--five. A sudden, curious weakness seized him
as he listened. Deep within it was, deadly yet somehow sweet, and hard
to resist. He felt like sinking down upon the snow and lying there.... They had been climbing for five hours.... It was, of course, the warning
of complete exhaustion. With a great effort he fought and overcame it. It passed away as
suddenly as it came. "We'll turn," he said with a decision he hardly felt. "It will be dawn
before we reach the village again. Come at once. It's time for home." The sense of exhilaration had utterly left him. An emotion that was akin
to fear swept coldly through him. But her whispering answer turned it
instantly to terror--a terror that gripped him horribly and turned him
weak and unresisting. "Our home is--_here_!" A burst of wild, high laughter, loud and shrill,
accompanied the words. It was like a whistling wind. The wind _had_
risen, and clouds obscured the moon. "A little higher--where we cannot
hear the wicked bells," she cried, and for the first time seized him
deliberately by the hand. She moved, was suddenly close against his
face. Again she touched him. And Hibbert tried to turn away in escape, and so trying, found for the
first time that the power of the snow--that other power which does not
exhilarate but deadens effort--was upon him. The suffocating weakness
that it brings to exhausted men, luring them to the sleep of death in
her clinging soft embrace, lulling the will and conquering all desire
for life--this was awfully upon him. His feet were heavy and entangled. He could not turn or move. The girl stood in front of him, very near; he felt her chilly breath
upon his cheeks; her hair passed blindingly across his eyes; and that
icy wind came with her. He saw her whiteness close; again, it seemed,
his sight passed through her into space as though she had no face. Her
arms were round his neck. She drew him softly downwards to his knees. He
sank; he yielded utterly; he obeyed. Her weight was upon him,
smothering, delicious. The snow was to his waist.... She kissed him
softly on the lips, the eyes, all over his face. And then she spoke his
name in that voice of love and wonder, the voice that held the accent of
two others--both taken over long ago by Death--the voice of his mother,
and of the woman he had loved. He made one more feeble effort to resist. Then, realising even while he
struggled that this soft weight about his heart was sweeter than
anything life could ever bring, he let his muscles relax, and sank back
into the soft oblivion of the covering snow. Her wintry kisses bore him
into sleep. VII


They say that men who know the sleep of exhaustion in the snow find no
awakening on the hither side of death.... The hours passed and the moon
sank down below the white world's rim. Then, suddenly, there came a
little crash upon his breast and neck, and Hibbert--woke. He slowly turned bewildered, heavy eyes upon the desolate mountains,
stared dizzily about him, tried to rise. At first his muscles would not
act; a numbing, aching pain possessed him. He uttered a long, thin cry
for help, and heard its faintness swallowed by the wind. And then he
understood vaguely why he was only warm--not dead. For this very wind
that took his cry had built up a sheltering mound of driven snow against
his body while he slept. Like a curving wave it ran beside him. It was
the breaking of its over-toppling edge that caused the crash, and the
coldness of the mass against his neck that woke him. Dawn kissed the eastern sky; pale gleams of gold shot every peak with
splendour; but ice was in the air, and the dry and frozen snow blew like
powder from the surface of the slopes. He saw the points of his ski
projecting just below him. Then he--remembered. It seems he had just
strength enough to realise that, could he but rise and stand, he might
fly with terrific impetus towards the woods and village far beneath. The
ski would carry him. But if he failed and fell ...! How he contrived it Hibbert never knew; this fear of death somehow
called out his whole available reserve force. He rose slowly, balanced a
moment, then, taking the angle of an immense zigzag, started down the
awful slopes like an arrow from a bow. And automatically the splendid
muscles of the practised ski-er and athlete saved and guided him, for he
was hardly conscious of controlling either speed or direction. The snow
stung face and eyes like fine steel shot; ridge after ridge flew past;
the summits raced across the sky; the valley leaped up with bounds to
meet him. He scarcely felt the ground beneath his feet as the huge
slopes and distance melted before the lightning speed of that descent
from death to life. He took it in four mile-long zigzags, and it was the turning at each
corner that nearly finished him, for then the strain of balancing taxed
to the verge of collapse the remnants of his strength. Slopes that have taken hours to climb can be descended in a short
half-hour on ski, but Hibbert had lost all count of time. Quite other
thoughts and feelings mastered him in that wild, swift dropping through
the air that was like the flight of a bird. For ever close upon his
heels came following forms and voices with the whirling snow-dust. He
heard that little silvery voice of death and laughter at his back.