A shower of sparks arose and the strong smell of burning clothes, as

Sanderson, stunned and helpless, lay across the blazing fire-place.

For a moment, David thought to leave his vanquished foe to his own

fate, then he turned back. What was the use? It could not right the

wrong he had done to Anna. He bent over Sanderson, extinguished the

fire, pulled the unconscious man to the open door and left him.

It came to David like an inspiration that he had not thought of the

lake; the ice was thin on the southern shore below where the river

emptied. Suppose she had gone there; suppose in her utter desolation

she had gone there to end it all? Imagination, quickened by suspense

and suffering, ran to meet calamity; already he was there and saw the

bare trees, bearing their burden of snow, and the placid surface, half

frozen over, and on the southern shore, that faintly rippled under its

skimming of ice, something dark floating. He saw the floating black

hair, and the dead eyes, open, as if in accusation of the grim

injustice of it all.

He hurried through the drifted snow, as fast as his spent strength

would permit, stumbling once or twice over some obstruction, and

covered the weary distance to the lake.

About a hundred yards from the lake Dave saw something that made his

heart knock against his ribs and his breath come short, as if he had

been running. It was Anna's gray cloak. It lay spread out on the snow

as if it had been discarded hastily; there were footprints of a woman's

shoes near by; some of them leading toward the lake, others away from

it, as if she might have come and her courage failed her at the last

moment. The cape had not the faintest trace of snow on its upturned

surface. It must, therefore, have been discarded lately, after the

snowstorm had ceased this morning.

Dave continued his search in an agony of apprehension. The sun faintly

struggled with the mass of gray cloud, revealing a world of white. He

had wandered in the direction of a clump of cedars, and remembered

pointing the place out to her in the autumn as the scene of some boyish

adventure, which to commemorate he had cut his name on one of the

trees. Association, more than any hope of finding her, led him to the

cedars--and she was there. She had fallen, apparently, from cold and

exhaustion. He bent down close to the white, still face that gave no

sign of life. He called her name, he kissed her, but there was no

response--it was too late.




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