The donor showed no resentment at this ingratitude, holding the box on his knees, continuing to help himself to its contents with unabated zest, and to keep the conversation up to concert pitch:  “—­the only girl I ever saw who’d stop eating Alligretti’s while there was one left—­another proof that there’s only one of you—­I said right off, that any co-ed that Jerry Fiske would take to must be a unique specimen—­” He did not further specify the period to which he referred by his “right off,” but the phrase gave Sylvia a tingling, uncomfortable sense of having been for some time the subject of speculation in circles of which she knew nothing.

They were near Mercerton now, and as she gathered her wraps together she found that she was bracing herself as for an ordeal of some sort.  The big car stopped, a little way out of town, in front of a long driveway bordered with maple-trees; she and the young man descended from one end-platform and Eleanor Hubert from the other, into the midst of loud and facetious greetings from the young people who had come down to meet them.  Jerry was there, very stalwart, his white sweater stretched over his broad chest.  All the party carried skates, which flashed like silver in the keen winter sun.  They explained with many exclamations that they had been out on the ice, which was, so the three new-comers were assured many times, “perfectly grand, perfectly dandy, simply elegant!”

A big, many-seated sled came jingling down the driveway now, driven by no less a personage than Colonel Fiske himself, wrapped in a fur-lined coat, his big mustache white against the red of his strongly marked old face.  With many screams and shouts the young people got themselves into this vehicle, the Colonel calling out in a masterful roar above the din, “Miss Marshall’s to come up here with me!”

He held in his pawing, excited horses with one hand and helped Sylvia with the other.  In the seat behind them sat Jerry and Eleanor Hubert and the young man of the trolley trip.  Sylvia strained her ears to catch Jerry’s introduction of him to Eleanor, so that she might know his name.  It was too absurd not even to know his name!  But the high-pitched giggles and deeper shouts of mirth from the rest of the party drowned out the words.  As a matter of fact, although he played for an instant a rather important role in Sylvia’s drama, she was destined never to know his name.

The Colonel looked back over the sleighload, shouted out “All aboard!” loosened the reins, and snapped his whip over the horses’ heads.  They leaped forward with so violent a spring that the front runners of the long sled were for an instant lifted into the air.  Immediately all the joyful shrieking and screaming which had gone on before, became as essential silence compared to the delighted uproar which now rose from the sleigh.  The jerk had thrown most of the young people over backward into each other’s arms and laps, where, in a writhing,