She reached the right-hand turn, and then she was on the direct Kingston road, with a ten-mile stretch before her.

It was past one o'clock, and she could not reach her journey's end much before dark.
About two miles after the turn of the road the more thickly set habitations ceased, and there were only isolated farm-houses, with long, sloping reaches of woods and pasture-lands between.

The pasture-lands were hummocked with ice-coated rocks and hooped with frozen vines; they seemed to flow down in glittering waves, like glaciers, over the hill-sides.

The woods stood white and petrified, as woods might have done in a glacial era.

There was no sound in them except now and then the crack of a bough under the weight of ice, and slow, painful responses, like the twangs of rusty harp-strings, to the harder gusts of wind.