The Night in the Snowstorm

"Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
Hides hills and woods, the river and the heaven."--Emerson.

All through that long, wild night David searched and shouted, to find
only snow and silence.

Through the darkness and the falling flakes he could not see more than
a foot ahead, and when he would stumble over a stone or the fallen
trunk of a tree, he would stoop down and search through the drifts with
his bare hands, thinking perhaps that she might have fallen, and not
finding her, he would again take up his fruitless search, while cold
fear gnawed at his heart.

At home in the warm farm house, sat the Squire who had done his duty.
The consciousness of having done it, however, did not fill him with
that cheerful glow of righteousness that is the reward of a good
conscience--on the contrary, he felt small. It might have been
imagination, but he felt, somehow, as if his wife and Kate were
shunning him. Once he had tried to take his wife's hand as she stood
with her face pressed to the window trying to see if she could make out
the dim outline of David returning with Anna, but she withdrew her hand
impatiently as she had never done in the thirty years of their married
life. Amasy's hardness was a thing no longer to be condoned.