Always the snow fell, steadily, remorselessly. Every night it snowed, and every day more or less, with intervals of brilliant sunshine. The wind blew with increasing violence, tossing the snow into huge drifts upon the meadow, which Marion still saw sometimes in her wood gathering, and sifting it in level masses among the trees, and flinging it in great banks against the cliff. Up and up crept the drifts and banks and levels until there came a day when she could do no more.
And that day it seemed that she could have done no more in any kind of weather, under any inspiration or necessity. The record of what she did is but a footnote to the page of what she suffered. Time after time she had sunk down in the snow and lain there exhausted until strength came to her again from somewhere, and then had risen _manfully_ to her work. For it was a man's work she did, with a courage as much greater than a man's as her strength was less. She was strong, for a woman; she had lived all her life much out of doors; and she had entered upon this ordeal in perfect health. But her willingness outsped her powers; and when the snow had spared her by driving her into the cave, she fairly staggered and groped and leaned against the wall, and knew that if she should now collapse she would never rise again. But even in that climax of her suffering, when for a moment she dared not move, in fear of toppling over on the floor, and could not keep back her sobs, there was an answer ready when Haig called to her across the cave.
"He never balked or--hesitated. He never threw me--but once, and that wasn't his fault. It was--"
She stopped. And out of what black depths, and across what vistas of hope and despair and love and anguish, she looked back to that scene in the golden summer, in the Forbidden Pasture.
Then she told him brokenly how she had just said farewell to Tuesday; how he stood at the foot of the slope, thin as a specter, belly-deep in snow, his nose lifted inquiringly toward her.
"Good-by, Tuesday!" she cried; and fled stumbling up the slope, her hands on her ears to shut out his plaintive whinny.
Haig watched her narrowly, and was not deceived. Through the first few days of Marion's struggles he had lain on his pallet in almost complete indifference, in full acceptance of the fate that awaited them; not callous to her sufferings, but resigned, as he thought, to endure what could not be prevented. Having resolved to humor her, he went from the extreme of resistance to the extreme of submission, and hardened his heart to endure what galled and humiliated and degraded him. Then anger seized him once more,--anger at Marion, anger at himself, anger at Thursby, anger at circumstances, chance and destiny: blinding and suffocating anger. To have been brought to this shameful state, to lie there watching a woman, a mere girl, perform these menial tasks for him--for him who had execrated and despised and scorned her sex--for him who had accepted such services grudgingly even from men--for him who had stalked around the world in defiant independence, indebted to no man and obligated to no woman: this was odious and intolerable. And it must be tolerated!