Compliments upon her, charms were platitudes to Christine, and she cut him short.  “Yes, it is.  It’s because I’m so detached, and don’t interfere, and let you do things your own way, and think you so wonderful to be able to do them at all.  Now if I knew how to do them, too, I should be criticizing and suggesting all the time, and you’d have no peace.  You like me for being a poor housekeeper.”

He smiled.  “On that ground I ought to like you very much then,” he answered.

“Perhaps you do,” she said cheerfully.  “Anyhow I’m sure you like me better than that other girl you were thinking of—­that good housekeeper.  Who is she?”

“I like her quite a lot.”

“I see—­you think she’d make a good wife.”

“I think she’d make a good wife to any man who was fortunate enough—­”

“Oh, what a dreadful way to talk of the poor girl!”

“On the contrary, I admire her extremely.”

“I believe you are engaged to her.”

“Not as much as you are to Hickson.”

Christine laughed.  “From the way you describe her,” she said, “I believe she’d make a perfect wife for Ned.”

“Oh, she’s much too good for him.”

“Thank you.  You seem to think I’ll do nicely for him.”

“Ah, but she’s much better than you are.”

“And yet you said you’d rather have me here than her.”

He smiled.  “I think,” he said, and Christine rather waited for his next words, “I think I shall go down and see if I can’t get the furnace going.”

Nevertheless, she said to herself when he was gone, “I should not feel at all easy about him, if I were the other girl.”

She knew there was no prospect of their being rescued that night.  When the sleigh arrived at the Usshers’, if it ever did arrive, its empty shattered condition would suggest an accident.  The Usshers were at that moment probably searching for them in ditches, and hedges.  The marks of the sleigh would be quickly obliterated by the storm.  No, she thought comfortably, there was no escape from the fact that their situation was compromising.  The only question was how could the matter be most tactfully called to his attention.  At the moment he seemed happily unaware that such things as the proprieties existed.

At this his head appeared at the head of the cellar stairs.

“Watch the cereal, please,” he said, “and see that it doesn’t burn.”

“Like King Alfred?”

“Not too much like him, please, for that pitiful little dab of food is about all we have to eat.”

When he was gone Christine advanced toward the stove and looked at the cereal—­looked at it closely, but it seemed to her to be but little benefited by her attention.  Presently she discovered on a shelf beside the laundry clock a pinkish purple paper novel, called:  “The Crime of the Season.”  Its cover depicted a man in a check suit and side-whiskers looking on in astonishment at the removal of a drowned lady in full evening dress from a very minute pond.  Christine opened it, and was so fortunate as to come full upon the crime.  She became as completely absorbed in it as the laundress had been before her.