Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/789

she could not get warm; it was colder she got, and then she slipped again, and went sliding down a hollow faster and faster, she came to the brink of a cleft and swished over this and down into a hole of ice and there she lay.

"I shall die," she said. "I shall fall asleep here and die."

Then she awoke.

She opened her eyes directly on the window and saw the dawn struggling with the darkness, a film of greyish light which framed the window, but did not lift the obscurity of the room, and she lay for a second smiling to herself at her grotesque dream and thanking God that it had only been a dream; the next second she felt that she was cold. She pulled the clothes more tightly about her, and she spoke to her husband

"How miserably cold it is!" she said.

She turned over in the bed and lay against him for warmth, and then she found that the atrocious cold came from him, that it was he. She leaped out of bed with a scream, switched on the light and bent over him. He was stone dead, he was stone cold, and she stood by him shivering and whimpering.