“Please, oh, please do!” he exclaimed quickly, and as he spoke he caught her hand away, that had begun to tug at the collar.

“I wouldn’t keep it for the world—­and have you cold, but—­I can’t get out,” she answered with a laugh.  “Please show me or call for help.”

And as she pleaded Andrew Sevier towered beside her, tall and slender, while the cold breeze with its pine-laden breath ruffled his white shirt-sleeves across his arms.  Caroline Darrah in the embrace of his clinging apparel was a sight that sent the blood through his veins at a rate that warred with the winds, and his eyes drank deeply.  The color mounted under her eyes and with the unconsciousness of a child she nestled her chin in the woolly folds about the neck as she turned her face from the firelight.

“Well, then, get David’s coat from the car,” she pleaded.

“Will you stand back in the shadow of that tree until I do?” he asked.

He had caught across the fire a glimpse of the restive Hobson and a sudden mad desire prompted him to snatch this one joy from Fate, come what would—­just a few hours with her under the winter stars, when life seemed to offer so little in the count of the years.

“Why, yes, of course!  Did you think I’d dare go out in the dark alone, without you?” and her joyous ingenuous casting of herself upon his protection was positively poignant.  “Hurry, please, because I—­don’t want anybody to find me before you come!” After which request it took him very little time to run across the lot and vault the fence into the road where the electric stood.

“It’s so uncertain how things arrange themselves sometimes, some places,” she remarked to herself as she caught sight of the movements of the foiled Hobson, whose search had now become an open maneuver.

Suddenly she laid her cheek against the arm of the sweater and sniffed it with her delicate nose—­yes, there was the undeniable fragrance of the major’s Seven Oaks heart-leaf.  “He steals the tobacco, too,” she again remarked to herself as she caught sight of him skirting the fires as he returned.

Just at this moment a pandemonium of yelps, barks, bays and yells broke forth up the ravine and declared the hunt on.

“Everybody follow the dogs and keep within hearing distance!  We’ll wait for the trailers to come up when we tree before we shake down!” shouted David as with one accord the whole company plunged into the woods.

Away from the fire, the starlight, which was beginning to be reinforced by the glow from a late old moon, was bright enough to keep the rush up the ravine, over log and boulder, through tangle and across open, a not too dangerous foray.

The first hurdle was a six-rail fence that snaked its way between a frozen meadow and a woods lot.  David stationed himself on the far side of the lowest and strongest panel and proceeded to swing down the girls whom Hob and Tom persuaded to the top rail.