The cold was intense.

It seemed to penetrate to her very bones, and she knew by her companion's low moaning that she was suffering keenly also.
Isabel seemed to have sunk into a state of semi-consciousness, and only now and then did broken words escape her--words scarcely audible to Dinah, but which testified none the less to the bitterness of despair that had come upon her.
She sat in a corner of the desolate place with Dinah pressed close to her, while the snow drifted in through the door-less entrance and sprinkled them both.

But it was the darkness rather than the cold or the snow that affected the girl as she crouched there with her arms about her companion, striving to warm and shelter her while she herself felt frozen to the very heart.

It was so terrible, so monstrous, so nerve-shattering.
And the silence that went with it was like a nightmare horror to her shrinking soul.

For all Dinah's sensibilities were painfully on the alert.