"They hate snow...."
she whispered, not knowing whether it was true. She tried to picture
them as a band of workmen, who, content with their little pillage, were
now far from her on their way to some encampment.
Finding the torch still caught between the mudguard and the bonnet, she
prowled round the car, flashing it into corners and pits of darkness.
There was no sign of a lurking face or flutter of garment.
Snow began to fall, patting her noiselessly on her face and hands, and
curling faster and faster across the lights. In twenty minutes the road
around her was lightened, and cones of delicate softness grew between
the spokes of the wheels.
Climbing down again from her perch, Fanny went to the back of the car,
and, taking from beneath the seat her box of tools, she groped in the
hollow under the wood and pulled out an iron bar, stout and slightly
bent, with a knob at one end--the handle of the wheel jack.
* * * * *
Far away, in what seemed another world, equally blind, snowy and obscure,
but divided from this one by fathoms of frozen water, a car was coming
out from Pont-a-Moussons on to the main Nancy road. Its two head-lamps
glowed confusedly under the snow that clung to them, and the driver, his
thick, blue coat buttoned about his chin, leant forward peering through
the open windscreen, stung, blinded, and blinking as the flakes drove in.
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