on Ruth. She only knew that her beloved had come, that she was soothing and ministering to him, and her heart was singing its song of triumphant love. The long night of the soul was over. The morning had come. The storm without was on another planet.

As they watched he began to talk in fevered halfdream, half-delirium-words, phrases and broken sentences that revealed the inner yearnings and conflicts of his soul.

"Silly fool," he muttered. "Beauty-marvelous -Ruth-dear dark eyes-I-love-her."

As day approached Ruth began to dread its message. Already she could see the officers at the door.

The

The

When day broke she tried to look out of the window, and could only see across the street. park and the city below were blotted out. whole world seemed one white, swirling, howling smother of snow. The wind came in long gusts of shrieking fury. She could count its pulse-beats in the lulls which were growing shorter. And, child of the sea that she was, she knew that the advancing cyclone had not reached its climax. She breathed a prayer of relief. They could not find him to-day.

The cook did not come. Not a milk-wagon or bread-cart echoed through the street. Not a call of newsboy, whistle of postman, or cry of a schoolboy. The house-girl had not come. Ruth descended to the kitchen, made a fire, and cooked breakfast.

With her own hands she was serving her Love, and her heart was singing.

At ten o'clock she looked out of her window and the snow was piled to the second story of the houses opposite, which were receiving the full fury of the blast.

The wind was visible. It blew in white, roaring sheets of snow, howling, whistling, screaming, shrieking. Tin roofs, signs, battered chimney-tops, blinds, awnings, brackets, flagpoles, sheet-iron eaves and every odd and end began to crash and rain in the streets and bury themselves in the drifts.

The woman's heart rode on the wings of the storm. Her beloved was hiding safe beneath its white feathers. She wondered if any one else in all the world were singing for joy with its wild music.

For three hours of the morning struggling men had braved the storm and fought to reach their places of business. Shouts, curses, calls, laughter, the screams of boys, at first; and then defeat, silence and the roar of the wind.

Street-cars were piled on their sides, and the tracks jammed with débris and mountains of snow.

At eleven o'clock, from Manhattan there was no Jersey or Brooklyn. The ferries were still. The great dead Bridge hung swaying in the dark sky, a white festoon of ice and snow, like a jeweled garland swung from heaven to soften the terrible beauty of a frozen world. The waters below were lashed into a white smother of spray. The air cut like a knife

with the sand blown from the flying waves of the distant beaches.

Policemen crouched and shivered in barred doorways. The storm had caged every thief, burglar and murderer, as it had sheathed the claws of every bear and wolf on the distant mountain-side.

The snow was piled over the tops of the doors of the City Hall and Court House. There, no Mayor, no court, no jury.

The Stock Exchange was closed, the Custom House and Sub-Treasury silent, and every school without teacher or scholar. Every depot

placarded, and not a wheel was moving. Not a newspaper found its way to a home, or a single piece of mail arrived in New York, or was sent from it, or delivered within its gates. Every telegraph and telephone office was silent and the fire department was paralysed.

The elevated trains crawled and slipped and stalled and fought on their steel trestles till ten o'clock, and the last wheel stopped and froze.

At three o'clock a Staten Island ferry-boat ventured her nose out of her slip. The wind snapped off both flag-staffs and smokestack, hurled them into space, caught her in its mighty claws, dragged her helpless across the bay and flung her on the Staten Island shore.

Wherever men could gather they talked in low, helpless and bewildered tones.

The storm signal, set by the Weather Bureau, was

torn to shreds and the wind-gage hurled into the sky as it registered eighty-two miles an hour.

On the mountains of Colorado and over the plains of Dakota it had begun, a fine, misty rain sweeping eastward, throwing out its soft skirmish-line of breezes, drawn by the summons of the Storm King far out on the waste of the sea. And then the king

had blown his frozen breath on the earth and the mighty city had been blotted from the map and its tumult stilled in soft white death.

Ruth drew Gordon to the window against which the sparrows crouched and shivered, that he might watch the storm's wild pranks.

"After all," the wounded man cried, "it has been conquered, the rushing, tumultuous city! Beyond the rim of man's map of the world broods in silence the One to whom its noise is the rustle of a leaf and this wind but a sigh of His breath! What can endure?"

His eyes rested on the smiling, lovelit face of Ruth, and he forgot the storm in the deeper wonder of a pure woman's love.

CHAPTER XXXI

A LACE HANDKERCHIEF

THE next morning the lulls between the gusts of wind grew longer and the wind-waves shorter. The snow ceased to fall and the shadows on the clouds began to brighten with the glow of the sun behind them.

The city stirred and shook off its white robe of death. The woman looked at the wounded man

with a stifled moan.

"It's no use, Ruth," he said, feebly. "I can't escape. I've got to face it."

"What will they do to you, Frank?" she asked, in misery.

"I don't know," he answered, brokenly. "I killed him in the heat of passion in a fight. But I'll be tried for murder."

The officers came and read the warrant of arrest. The dark, tense figure, erect, with defiant face wreathed in midnight hair, stood by his bedside and held his hand.

Her great eyes glowed and gleamed as though a young lioness stood guard over a wounded cub.

Behind the bars in murderers' row the weeks