Sun and snow and the sharp, conical shadows of cedar. Green, deep green the pines; blue the sky; white the land and the lake—white, all white. The lake lay level under its snow. Crack, crack resounded the ice in the strait. Wood-smoke above the chimneys; rabbit tracks beyond the ghosts of the garden.
Ellen was at home and her father was with her. They had not much to say, these two, but they liked to be together, especially to-day before Jay should come—Jay—Jay Rountree who to arrive in another hour, and to-morrow, marry her.
Marry? He had never been, in fact, the husband of Lida; Ellen knew that now. Mr. Rountree had told her that Lida had been but "nominally" Jay's wife.
Marry; Jay and she were to marry. The family was all in a flurry—except her father. He sat beside the fire with his pipe and gazed into the flames and packed his pipe and sometimes patted Ellen's hand and sometimes said a word to her.
"It's to be a different life for ye, Ellen. Strange for ye."
"Yes," said Ellen. Strange for her but not so strange for her as strange to her father.
She looked at him and remembered how, throughout the half hour when he was bringing his ship beside the Gant, the world had waited and watched him; and here he sat beside her, the same as she had known him always. Never, likely, would Jay, whom she would marry to-morrow, do a thing to equal her father. His was to be a different life, strange to her father's. Why, so easily and without a doubt of herself, was she to leave the life of
