Page:Possession (1926).pdf/116

 path between the shaggy, frozen lilacs that marked the path to that extraordinary house of the shabby and respectable Tollivers. 

ALKER'S Pond lay on the outskirts of the Town, a long sinuous expanse of water, frozen now, which wound its length between two long low hills left behind by the melting of the second great glacier. It twisted its way among the convolutions of rock and earth in a multitude of small coves and inlets, fringed by tangled bushes and low willows that stood black and naked in the winter wind. At the lower end the pond expanded into a broad and circular lake on the borders of which stood a low shed. Here it was that the crowds from the Town did their skating and here it was that May, in ignorance of the promise exacted by her impatient father, had brought the reluctant Clarence.

Any one watching the course of Ellen as she neared the spot must have realized that she had no intention of joining the crowd; instead of approaching the pond by the road of frozen clay which ended near the shed, she turned off through the fields, and swinging her skates, struck out for the far end where it lengthened into a serpentine canal. As she walked her skirts struck the ice coated stalks of the dead weeds, causing them to break off and fall beneath her feet with a slight tinkling sound of distant, crystal music. Among the bushes that bordered the fields the berries of the dogwood showed crimson against the black of the bare branches with a color rivaled only by the dark flame of the plumed sumach. Something in the day's brilliance must have penetrated the soul of the girl, for she sang as she walked more and more quickly in the direction of the ice. There was in her manner, now that she was once more alone and unharassed, something wild and passionate, a sort of untamed fierceness of the spirit. 