CHAPTER VIII
THE GREY PLACE
VARGE saw it first, as the horses, toiling up the long hill over the heavy, snow-banked road, gained the summit. A quarter of a mile away and below it lay. Grey—it was all grey—sullen grey. It was early morning; and with the sun, under cloud, just struggling through a rift in the hills to the eastward, it was as though the grim presence mocked and bade defiance even to God's own blessed sunlight that seemed to creep now so timidly to the shadowed walls, pleading warmth and love and hope and divine compassion. Silent—no sound came from it—it was as a vast tomb, from which emanated a terrible, impersonal, immutable sense of isolation; a sepulchre that had neither part nor being in the world around it, that had usurped the very place it held and, usurping, chilled all joy and gladness and stilled all laughter. It was only a thing of stone, inanimate, reared by human hands, but it lived as a cold, dead thing lives, as death lives in its awful finality.
Beside Sheriff Marston in the back seat of the sleigh, Varge felt the quick, questioning scrutiny of the other. No muscle of his face moved, no change came to the grave, sober expression that has been there during the eight-mile drive from Berley Falls—but under the buffalo robe his manacled hands tightened over each other.
For life. Black hour of bitterness! LIFE—it
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