I shall be back in a moment." She reappeared a few minutes later, wearing a white hood with a cape, and a knitted woolen shawl over her shoulders.
"This way!" said she, showing a path that led across the pasture-lands.
They walked along silently at first.

The sky was clear, the wind had freshened.

Suddenly, as if by enchantment, the fog, which had hung over the forest, became converted into needles of ice.

Each tree was powdered over with frozen snow, and on the hillsides overshadowing the valley the massive tufts of forest were veiled in a bluish-white vapor.
Never had Julien de Buxieres been so long in tete-a-tete with a young woman.

The extreme solitude, the surrounding silence, rendered this dual promenade more intimate and also more embarrassing to a young man who was alarmed at the very thought of a female countenance.