At length, on a bright and glittering day, when it seemed the storms had finally abandoned their enmity, they climbed slowly up the long slopes to Simpson's Pass, and stood at noon high above a wide and wonderful world of snow, with white mountains succeeding one another, range on range, as far as their eyes could reach before them and behind. And that afternoon, as they toiled around the shoulder of Big Bear Mountain, they stopped and gazed,--Marion with tears streaming down her cheeks, and Haig with his hands clenched tightly at his sides. For there, still far away below them, but _there_ beyond all mistake, lay Paradise Park, very white and still and glittering in the sun; and off at the right was Thunder Mountain, squatting among the silver peaks, its sullen head half hidden by gray-black clouds.
The lamp had not been lighted in the sitting-room at Huntington's, but the pitch log blazing in the great fireplace reddened the farthest corners of the room, and flushed the somber faces of Seth and Claire. Their habit, in these days of grief, was to sit the winter evenings through almost in silence, their self-reproaches long since spent, their hopes turned to ashes, which Claire alone tried sometimes to fan into a glow. They had eaten their supper before twilight, without speech, and then, as always, waited wearily for sleep.
"It will be three months and two weeks to-morrow," she said, without looking away from the fire.
"Isn't it possible she may have reached--"
"It's no use, Claire, thinking such things."
"But Pete! He hasn't come back, and maybe that means--"
She did not even finish the sentence, which simply faded away on her lips, a useless and foolish conjecture.
Another long silence followed. Seth's cigarette went out, and hung dead from his bearded lips, while he stared gloomily into the blaze. He sat with his back toward the front door. Claire, near a corner of the big stone chimney, leaned forward, her head inclined to one side, the cheek resting on her open hand, the elbow on her knee. Her eyes, which had been lifted from their long gazing at the fire at the moment she addressed her husband, were fixed on vacancy, looking past Huntington toward the door that led out upon the veranda, where the rising wind tossed little whirls of snow and dead leaves from the flower garden. She was torturing herself with a conjured vision of a wild, high place among snowbound rocks, in the midst of which a slender figure was slowly sinking down, and a white and stricken face was turned toward her. This was the vision that had become for her the settled picture of Marion's fate, a picture that was burned into her brain by many, many hours of imagining, day and night.