“Hardly,” said Mr. Dunmore, looking out of the window at the storm, whose clouds of flying snow hid even the great mountain shapes from view.

“I don’t know why the storm should stop me. It isn’t any colder than my husband’s heart,” said Mrs. Dunmore. “And I’d as lief hear it now as hear you. It will be April and spring to-morrow, and no storm to be seen, but it will always be winter in your heart. You can leave your money, that you treasure so much more than you do my happiness, where you please. I don’t want any of it, or anything else that belongs to you. I wish I was dead and out of your way! You can keep it for your second wife to spend, if she can get hold of it, which is more than I can do. I never want to look upon your face again! If there’s anything in the world detestable to me it’s meanness and stinginess and parsimony and miserliness and--” And here, words failing her and tears coming in their stead, Mrs. Dunmore rushed from the room and sought the seclusion of her bedchamber, where she hid her head in the pillows and cried herself into hysterics. And Mr. Dunmore, feeling that the house was far too hot to hold him, strode into the hall, and put on his great fur overcoat, and buckled the hood about his ears, and slammed the door behind him, refusing to wait for the stout cob that usually bore him, and going out afoot into a storm that was no fiercer than the one raging within him at that moment.

A pretty sort of a home he had! his thoughts ran. The hospitality of the tempest was gentleness beside it. A shrew and a vixen and a spendthrift for a wife, who cared nothing for him but what she could get out of him, and made no acknowledgment of that; who scorned and flouted and fleered him, had no regard for his feelings, called him--called him names! What a fool he was to submit to it! Why didn’t he send her--why didn’t he send her back to her aunt Potter’s, and sell out, and clear out himself? This life he lived was--it was no use saying what it was! It was the life to come, and he had been damned into it! He wished he had never seen her face! What an idiot a man was to give up his peace, his liberty, his pleasure, his everything, for the sake of companionship with a woman who thwarted him at every turn, in his feelings, his wishes, his will, till there was no peace in the house, and a struggle with the wildest storm that ever blew was rest, was relief from home and her! And in a white heat of angry commotion he plunged along, he hardly knew and hardly cared whither, although really bound for the upper fields, in order to give some directions to the shepherds of the great sheep farm he carried on. And the wind roared above him and about him unheeded as, with head bent forward and hands clenched in his pockets, he labored on; and the snow whirled and fell and rose again, and built up its fantastic drifts on either side, and, occupied in his bitter musings, he saw and heard none of it.

And none of it did Mrs. Helena hear or see, with her head buried in her pillows, crying now partly with pity of her own wretchedness, partly in the subsidence of her anger at she hardly knew what, and partly with the unspent force of her nervous agitation. Occasionally she sat up and twisted the long coil of her fallen hair, and enjoyed a sensation as if she were in some manner wringing her hands and tearing her hair. She called herself the most miserable woman under the sun, condemned to a living prison, bound to a man who detested her, and whom she--yes, whom she detested! A man? A brute! Oh, why had she ever given herself up to such a fate? What was there she had seen in him in the first place? Why hadn’t she divined his sordid and tyrannical nature then? Why had she let herself be overcome by his false promises, his smile, his face that used to seem to her like the face of a god, and now was that of a satyr--yes, of a satyr! A great bluff wind-blown satyr! How infamously he had talked to her about her dividend! He grudged her the clothes she put on; she was a burden to him, and he made her feel it, and, quite unconscious of the uncommonly congenial feeling in this regard, she wished she had never laid eyes on him. It was a shame for a man to treat his wife so! And there was more crying and wringing of hands; and then the great shoulder of the gale came pushing against the house so it startled her and made her shudder, and she lay back silent a moment, and then bunched the pillow about her ears, and in five minutes, worn out with her temper and her tantrum, was fast asleep.

And Mr. Dunmore, with the gale whistling about his ears, ploughed his way along the hillside to the upper farms, more to satisfy himself that the sheep were all folded than for anything else, now and then shaking the snow from his shoulders as a shaggy dog shakes off water-drops, and again bending his head and working onward, the new snow already ankle-deep and drifting wildly with the wind that at every gust seemed to blow more fiercely. At last he reached the little house of the shepherds, all glowing with his successful struggle with the storm, and half forgetful of the rage with which he at first dashed into it; quite forgetful before his business with the shepherds was entirely finished, having disburdened his mind of all that had been weighing on it, feeling in a somewhat forgiving mood towards his irate little wife, who, after all, was not so much to blame, he said to himself; only a pretty woman a little spoiled, who liked to have pretty things about her. He would go into town himself to-morrow, and get her that Royal Worcester she had been longing for, the poor child! Perhaps he had been too severe: it was the coffee--strong coffee always did fire up his nerves. A man was a wretch to talk so to a woman, anyway. And thus rambling on in his thoughts, he took the path down the hill, hardly remembering the tempest that hurtled round him, until all at once he felt as if it were making him its rallying-point, and found that it was all he could do, by summoning his strength, to stand up against it, while it sifted its fine icy particles under his coat and in about his neck and shoulders and ears in a way to make him eager to get out of its reach. No matter; a storm on the last day of March couldn’t amount to much, even up in these New Hampshire hills. It would soon blow over. He would leave the exposed and winding highway, take the short-cut across the fields and down through the sheltered piece of wood, and so get home in time for lunch. He rather pictured Helena to himself, as forgiving as he was, dressed in her pretty tea-gown of green plush and white and gold, waiting for him at the head of a lunch-table set with especial nicety.

But Mr. Dunmore made a mistake when he left the open road. Let it wind about as it would, it had its protected sides and places, and at the end arrived. But these pathless wastes of the open pastures, snowed over and utterly unprotected, arrived nowhere. Turning his back once or twice on some broader pressure of the blast, he failed to orient himself; he could not see a rod before him for the driving snow; he ought by this time to be near the end, but there was nothing of the little piece of wood to be seen or guessed; he attempted to go back and recover the main road; he paused at length, a mere atom in all the wide whirl and bluster of the storm, uncertain if the way led to left or right, before him or behind. He began to feel some slight apprehension then. He remembered all the dreadful stories he had read of Highland shepherds and their sheep in mountain snow-storms; and all at once he saw that he, too, in the bitterest blowing gale of the winter, had lost his way upon the hill. Very cold and very tired, half-desperate too, he thought a moment of sitting down to rest. But that would never do, and he took heart of grace and plodded and struggled on, only succeeding in making sure that he was going down the hill and not up, but not at all sure that he was not skirting the hill to arrive at the stream and the houseless banks of the other side of the mountain; not at all sure either that in the dizzy blindness of the snow the next step might not lead him over some precipitous rock and out into nothingness. He paused to thrill at the thought, and then he lurched on again. At any rate, his only salvation lay in keeping in motion; it was of no use to halloo; although he tried it once or twice, the gale blew his voice back down his throat and made him feel a more powerless mote than before, and he plunged along conscious that he must have wandered wide of the mark, and that the day must be drawing to a close. Helena, in her pretty gown at that pretty luncheon-table, began to fade out of his mental view. She had waited for him, doubtless, hoping he would come back in better humor. She had forgiven him. She would be thinking he was still in a rage with her. She--she might never know that he had forgiven her.

For Mr. Dunmore was now acknowledging to himself what he had only dimly and unconsciously felt before, that it was doubtful if the night did not overtake him up here in this pathless wilderness of snow and wind and fury, and bring death to him upon its wings. But not if he could help it. His heart beat up strongly with his determination, and he swung his arms and shook his shoulders, and still waded downward through the drifts. It was hard to move one foot before the other in the heavy snow-fall; hard to breathe in the force of the gale; impossible to hear anything but the resonance of the great gusts through the thick sky; impossible to see before him, the light growing less, not with the gale alone now, but with the declining day. Night was coming on, and he was lost in all the tumult of the tempestuous elements.