It had been snowing for hours, steadily, thickly, and
the cold was intense. The dead heather by the roadside had long been
completely hidden under that ever-increasing load. It lay in great
billows of white wherever the carriage lamps revealed it, stretching away
into the darkness, an immense, untrodden desert, wrapped in a deathly
silence, more terrible than any sound.
It seemed to Nan, shivering inside that cheerless cab, as if the world
had stopped like a run-down watch, and that she alone, with her
melancholy equipage, retained in all that vast stillness the power to
move.
She wished heartily that she had permitted Jerry to come to the station
to meet her, but for some reason not wholly intelligible to herself she
had prohibited this. And he, ever obedient to her behests, had sent the
conveyance to fetch her, remaining behind himself to complete the
preparations for her reception upon which he had been engaged for the
past two days at the tiny, incommodious shooting-box which his father had
bequeathed to him, and of which not very valuable piece of landed
property he was somewhat inordinately proud.
It had been a tedious cross-country journey, and the five miles from the
station seemed to Nan interminable. Already deep down in her heart were
stirring ghastly doubts regarding the advisability of this mad expedition
of hers. Jerry, as she well knew, was fully prepared to enjoy the
situation to the utmost.
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