With a threatening gesture of his hand, he turned from the door, and Ferrier heard his heavy steps scrunching along the shingly path.

He was still sitting with his elbow upon his knee, considering how he should broach the matter to his daughter, when a soft hand was laid upon his, and looking up, he saw her standing beside him. One glance at her pale, frightened face showed him that she had heard what had passed.

“I could not help it,” she said, in answer to his look. “His voice rang through the house. Oh, father, father, what shall we do?”

“Don’t you scare yourself,” he answered, drawing her to him, and passing his broad, rough hand caressingly over her chestnut hair. “We’ll fix it up somehow or another. You don‘t find your fancy kind o’ lessening for this chap, do you?”

A sob and a squeeze of his hand were her only answer.

“No; of course not. I shouldn’t care to hear you say you did. He’s a likely lad, and he‘s a Christian, which is more than these folks here, in spite o’ all their praying and preaching. There’s a party starting for Nevada to-morrow, and I’ll manage to send him a message letting him know the hole we are in. If I know anything o’ that young man, he’ll be back with with a speed that would whip electro-telegraphs.”

Lucy laughed through her tears at her father’s description.

“When he comes, he will advise us for the best. But it is for you that I am frightened, dear. One hears — one hears such dreadful stories about those who oppose the Prophet; something terrible always happens to them.”

“But we haven’t opposed him yet,” her father answered. “It will be time to look out for squalls when we do. We have a clear month before us; at the end of that, I guess we had best shin out of Utah.”

“Leave Utah!”

“That’s about the size of it.”

“But the farm?”

“We will raise as much as we can in money, and let the rest go. To tell the truth, Lucy, it isn’t the first time I have thought of doing it. I don’t care about knuckling under to any man, as these folk do to their damed Prophet. I’m a freeborn American, and it‘s all new to me. Guess I’m too old to learn. If he comes browsing about this farm, he might chance to run up against a charge of buckshot travelling in the opposite direction.”

“But they won’t let us leave,” his daughter objected.

“Wait till Jefferson comes, and we’ll soon manage that. In the meantime, don’t you fret yourself, my dearie, and don‘t get your eyes swelled up, else he’ll be walking into me when he sees you. There’s nothing to be afeared about, and there‘s no danger at all.”

John Ferrier uttered these consoling remarks in a very confident tone, but she could not help observing that he paid unusual care to the fastening of the doors that night, and that he carefully cleaned and loaded the rusty old shot-gun which hung upon the wall of his bedroom.

But what he could not bear was the darkness. The solid darkness confronting him drove him mad. So he rose, and made a light. He remained seated for a while, staring in front. He did not think of Gudrun, he did not think of anything.

Then suddenly he went downstairs for a book. He had all his life been in terror of the nights that should come, when he could not sleep. He knew that this would be too much for him, to have to face nights of sleeplessness and of horrified watching the hours.

So he sat for hours in bed, like a statue, reading. His mind, hard and acute, read on rapidly, his body understood nothing. In a state of rigid unconsciousness, he read on through the night, till morning, when, weary and disgusted in spirit, disgusted most of all with himself, he slept for two hours.

Then he got up, hard and full of energy. Gudrun scarcely spoke to him, except at coffee when she said:

‘I shall be leaving tomorrow.’

‘We will go together as far as Innsbruck, for appearance’s sake?’ he asked.

‘Perhaps,’ she said.

She said ‘Perhaps’ between the sips of her coffee. And the sound of her taking her breath in the word, was nauseous to him. He rose quickly to be away from her.

He went and made arrangements for the departure on the morrow. Then, taking some food, he set out for the day on the skis. Perhaps, he said to the Wirt, he would go up to the Marienhutte, perhaps to the village below.

To Gudrun this day was full of a promise like spring. She felt an approaching release, a new fountain of life rising up in her. It gave her pleasure to dawdle through her packing, it gave her pleasure to dip into books, to try on her different garments, to look at herself in the glass. She felt a new lease of life was come upon her, and she was happy like a child, very attractive and beautiful to everybody, with her soft, luxuriant figure, and her happiness. Yet underneath was death itself.

In the afternoon she had to go out with Loerke. Her tomorrow was perfectly vague before her. This was what gave her pleasure. She might be going to England with Gerald, she might be going to Dresden with Loerke, she might be going to Munich, to a girl–friend she had there. Anything might come to pass on the morrow. And today was the white, snowy iridescent threshold of all possibility. All possibility—that was the charm to her, the lovely, iridescent, indefinite charm,—pure illusion All possibility—because death was inevitable, and NOTHING was possible but death.

She did not want things to materialise, to take any definite shape. She wanted, suddenly, at one moment of the journey tomorrow, to be wafted into an utterly new course, by some utterly unforeseen event, or motion. So that, although she wanted to go out with Loerke for the last time into the snow, she did not want to be serious or businesslike.

And Loerke was not a serious figure. In his brown velvet cap, that made his head as round as a chestnut, with the brown–velvet flaps loose and wild over his ears, and a wisp of elf–like, thin black hair blowing above his full, elf–like dark eyes, the shiny, transparent brown skin crinkling up into odd grimaces on his small–featured face, he looked an odd little boy–man, a bat. But in his figure, in the greeny loden suit, he looked CHETIF and puny, still strangely different from the rest.