Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Don-a-dreams.djvu/98

 him as invigorating as an icy bath. It was nine o'clock by his watch. He scrambled into his clothes, his teeth chattering laughably. The water from his cracked basin stung on his hands and face. He smiled at the ghostly reflection of himself in the mirror that was as dull as a sheet of tin; and he laughed when he found that his watch, lying on the marble top of his washstand, had been stopped overnight by the penetrating cold of the stone. He went downstairs on tip-toe, in the silence of a house asleep, put on his overcoat and fur cap like a thief, and opened the front door on a sparkling level of new-fallen snow that lay, untracked—an unbroken wonder, a white spell of silence—over the empty street. He stood a moment, on the edge of it, almost reluctant to break the charm. Then he drew his cap down to his ears, and with an unvoiced shout of high spirits he ran down the porch steps and waded in.

The sunshine blinded him, breaking into prismatic colours on the lashes of his half-closed eyes. The snow silenced his footsteps. There was not even a stir of wind to make life around him. He walked in an enchanted world, through the stillness of a Sunday morning, his thought singing ecstatically, in a croon of pleasure, like a child at play.

He went without design, without direction. But unconsciously he turned into the way that led to college, and he strode along, swinging his arms, his head down against the sun, glancing at the houses which he passed, and smiling—with all the contempt of his frost-bitten and tingling alertness—at thought of the