But when he plunged forward to hold her, or at least to look, the girl was gone again.  And something in the way she stood there a few feet beyond, and stared down into his eyes so steadfastly in silence, made him shiver.  The moonlight was behind her, but in some odd way he could not focus sight upon her face, although so close.  The gleam of eyes he caught, but all the rest seemed white and snowy as though he looked beyond her—­out into space....

The sound of the church bell came up faintly from the valley far below, and he counted the strokes—­five.  A sudden, curious weakness seized him as he listened.  Deep within it was, deadly yet somehow sweet, and hard to resist.  He felt like sinking down upon the snow and lying there....  They had been climbing for five hours....  It was, of course, the warning of complete exhaustion.

With a great effort he fought and overcame it.  It passed away as suddenly as it came.

“We’ll turn,” he said with a decision he hardly felt.  “It will be dawn before we reach the village again.  Come at once.  It’s time for home.”

The sense of exhilaration had utterly left him.  An emotion that was akin to fear swept coldly through him.  But her whispering answer turned it instantly to terror—­a terror that gripped him horribly and turned him weak and unresisting.

“Our home is—­here!” A burst of wild, high laughter, loud and shrill, accompanied the words.  It was like a whistling wind.  The wind had risen, and clouds obscured the moon.  “A little higher—­where we cannot hear the wicked bells,” she cried, and for the first time seized him deliberately by the hand.  She moved, was suddenly close against his face.  Again she touched him.

And Hibbert tried to turn away in escape, and so trying, found for the first time that the power of the snow—­that other power which does not exhilarate but deadens effort—­was upon him.  The suffocating weakness that it brings to exhausted men, luring them to the sleep of death in her clinging soft embrace, lulling the will and conquering all desire for life—­this was awfully upon him.  His feet were heavy and entangled.  He could not turn or move.

The girl stood in front of him, very near; he felt her chilly breath upon his cheeks; her hair passed blindingly across his eyes; and that icy wind came with her.  He saw her whiteness close; again, it seemed, his sight passed through her into space as though she had no face.  Her arms were round his neck.  She drew him softly downwards to his knees.  He sank; he yielded utterly; he obeyed.  Her weight was upon him, smothering, delicious.  The snow was to his waist....  She kissed him softly on the lips, the eyes, all over his face.  And then she spoke his name in that voice of love and wonder, the voice that held the accent of two others—­both taken over long ago by Death—­the voice of his mother, and of the woman he had loved.

He made one more feeble effort to resist.  Then, realising even while he struggled that this soft weight about his heart was sweeter than anything life could ever bring, he let his muscles relax, and sank back into the soft oblivion of the covering snow.  Her wintry kisses bore him into sleep.