CHAPTER I

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THE SHADOWS DANCE

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      The short winter's day was drawing to its close, and twilight, the steel and silver twilight of a windless frost, falling in throbs of clear dusk over an ice-bound land. The sun, brilliant but cold as an electric lamp, had not in all the hours of its shining been of strength sufficient to melt the rime congealed during the night before, and each blade of grass on the lawns, each spray and sprig on the bare hedgerows, had remained a spear of crystals minute and innumerable. The roofs of house and cottage sparkled and glimmered as with a soft internal lustre in the light of the moon, which had risen an hour before sunset, and the stillness of great cold, a thing more palpably motionless than even the stricken noonday of the south, gripped all in its vice.