They were still following, mechanically and without effort, the wide course of the old St. Florentin road which lay two feet or three feet or five—according to the depth of the new drifts—below the glistening crust of the snow. The air had become so calm that the midday sun was dispensing more appreciable warmth. Ethel could feel it mitigating the cold of the air upon her cheek; she could see it beginning to melt the surface of the tiny snow ridges rounded up on the lower boughs of the trees. The sun failed to quite dissolve the snow, succeeding only in making it fluid enough to refreeze as ice on the bottom of the twigs and mantle the boughs more closely.
It was quite comfortable pushing along on skis; indeed, Ethel felt warm and loosened her coat collar. They had passed no one; and except for scars on the drifts here and there which probably marked Asa Redbird's trail to Quesnel, they saw no mark of human presence. Bird tracks patterned a powdery drift; a dog—probably the property of one of Asa's neighbors back in the woods—had crossed the road. Once a shadow flapped and passed obliquely before them; and Ethel, gazing up, saw a hawk high in the sky.
". . . talked a lot about it," Loutrelle was saying when next she was conscious of hearing. "But I had no particular reason for being interested. I'd lost some pals, of course; but we never talked in the trenches of caring to communicate with them. All that sort of thing was back home in England; and it seemed silly or queer, what I'd learned of it from Huston. His aunt and his cousins—the girls—went in for it hard; they'd lost their men, you see. They were all sure they were getting messages back and forth and could find out all sorts of things. They had a
