I suppose they've got him safe in his bed again," and with a nod to her sister she tripped up-stairs.
Uncomfortable and embarrassed, she knew not why, Kate sought her mother.
But that good lady was already in attendance on the patient, and Kate hurried past that baleful centre of attraction with a feeling of loneliness and strangeness she had never experienced before.

Entering her own room she went to the window--that first and last refuge of the troubled mind--and gazed out.

Turning her eyes in the direction of her morning's walk, she started back with a sense of being dazzled.

She rubbed first her eyes and then the rain-dimmed pane.

It was no illusion! The whole landscape, so familiar to her, was one vast field of dead, colorless white! Trees, rocks, even distance itself, had vanished in those few hours.