"Let her go it," droned the red-faced man, with a short chuckle.

"Hope she won't freeze her feet nor nothin'," said Dexter Beers,
uneasily.

"Let her _go_ it!" said the red-faced man, swinging across the yard
with his pails.

Madelon Hautville walked on steadily. She reached the right-hand
turn, and then she was on the direct Kingston road, with a ten-mile
stretch before her. It was past one o'clock, and she could not reach
her journey's end much before dark.

About two miles after the turn of the road the more thickly set
habitations ceased, and there were only isolated farm-houses, with
long, sloping reaches of woods and pasture-lands between. The
pasture-lands were hummocked with ice-coated rocks and hooped with
frozen vines; they seemed to flow down in glittering waves, like
glaciers, over the hill-sides. The woods stood white and petrified,
as woods might have done in a glacial era. There was no sound in them
except now and then the crack of a bough under the weight of ice, and
slow, painful responses, like the twangs of rusty harp-strings, to
the harder gusts of wind. The cold was so intense that the ice did
not melt in the noonday sun, and there were no soft droppings and
gurglings to modify this rigor of white light and sound. Occasionally
a rabbit crossed Madelon's path, silent as a little gray scudding
shadow, and so swiftly that he did not reach one's consciousness
until he was out of sight. There was seldom a winter bird, even, in
sight. The ice on the trees and the pastures had locked and sealed