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Before the snows melted and the first month of the new year had passed by, John Aggett and his master’s son were friends no more.

Of Timothy it may be recorded that he fought fiercely, then with waning strength, and finally succumbed and lost his battle. By slow degrees his intimacy with Sarah grew. Neither sought the other; but love dragged them together. The man hid it from his small world, or fancied that he did so; the girl blushed in secret and knew that what she had mistaken for love was mere attachment—an emotion as far removed from her affection for Timothy as the bloodless moonbeams from the flush of a rosy sunrise. A time came, and that quickly, when she could deceive herself no longer, and she knew that her life hung on her lover, while the other man was no more than a sad cloud upon the horizon of the future.

Frosts temporarily retarded the thaw, and Timothy and Sarah walked together at evening time in a great pine wood. A footpath, ribbed and fretted with snakelike roots, extended here, and moving along it they sighed, while the breath of the great trees bore their suspirations aloft into the scented silence. One band of orange light hung across the west and the evening star twinkled diamond-bright upon it, while perpendicularly against the splendour sprang the lines of pine trunks, dimmed aloft with network of broken and naked boughs, merging above into a sombre crown of accumulated foliage. Cushions of dead needles were crisp under foot and the whisper of growing ice tinkled on the ear.