"I am afraid of nothing," she declared. She rose, asked her way,
precisely, to the barn, and every detail as to what she was to expect,
waiting there in total silence; then she threw a fur cloak over her
shoulders, glanced at Nicolas, and went on.

She went along the corridor and down the back-stairs; while Nicolas,
saying that the heat of the room was too much for him, slipped out by
the front entrance. It was as cold as ever, and the moon seemed to be
shining even more brightly than before. The snow at her feet was strewn
with stars, while their sisters overhead twinkled in the deep gloom of
the sky, and she soon looked away from them, back to the gleaming earth
in its radiant mantle of ermine.

Nicolas hurried across the hall, turned the corner of the house, and
went past the side door where Sonia was to come out. Half-way to the
barn stacks of wood, in the full moonlight, threw their shadows on the
path, and beyond, an alley of lime-trees traced a tangled pattern on
the snow with the fine crossed lines of their leafless twigs. The beams
of the house and its snow-laden roof looked as if they had been hewn out
of a block of opal, with iridescent lights where the facets caught the
silvery moonlight. Suddenly a bough fell crashing off a tree in the
garden; then all was still again. Sonia's heart beat high with gladness;
as if she were drinking in not common air, but some life-giving elixir
of eternal youth and joy.

"Straight on, if you please, miss, and on no account look behind you."

"I am not afraid," said Sonia, her little shoes tapping the stone steps
and then crunching the carpet of snow as she ran to meet Nicolas, who
was within a couple of yards of her. And yet not the Nicolas of