He shivered violently while he spoke, and she saw a glassy look creep into his eyes and over his face, as if his features had been frozen in an instant of terror.  Panic seized her lest he should die there in the street, and she grasped his arm almost roughly as if she would shake him back into life.  As she supported him his teeth began to rattle, not as the teeth of the living chatter from fear, but as the teeth of a dead man might rattle when he is jolted in his coffin.  For a minute she felt the madness of her panic pass from her pulses to her brain, and her terror of him turned her as cold as the sleet-covered iron railing against which she leaned.  A cowardly impulse tempted her to desert him and run for her life, to seek shelter behind bolted doors, to leave him there alone to freeze to death at her gate.

“Gabriella, I’m afraid,” he whined, clinging to her arm.  “I’m afraid, Gabriella.  You can’t let go of me!”

An unspeakable loathing swept over her; his very touch seemed contamination; and while she turned toward the gate, she knew that every fibre of her flesh, every quiver of her nerves, revolted against the thing she was doing.  But something stronger than her flesh or her nerves—­the vein of iron in her soul—­decided the issue.

“Come in with me, and I’ll take care of you,” she said.  “There is the step.  Don’t stumble.  Here, steady yourself with the umbrella.  We are almost there now.”  Her voice was cold and hard; but the words were those she might have used to Archibald had she been leading him in out of the storm.

Still whimpering and stumbling, George clung to her with his desperate clutch, while she dragged him up the short walk, which was deep in snow, to the six steps, which appeared to her to reach upward into eternity.  As she approached the house, a light shone out suddenly in one of the windows and a sense of safety, of perfect security descended upon her, for she knew that it was the red glimmer of O’Hara’s fire.  With the sensation, she heard again her mother’s voice speaking above the storm:  “Gabriella, we’ll send immediately for your Cousin Jimmy Wrenn!” So, in the old days of her childhood, Cousin Jimmy had brought her this feeling of relief in the midst of distress.

Opening the door with her latchkey, she dragged George into the hall, where her thankful eyes fell on O’Hara’s overcoat, from which the water was, still dripping.  For an instant she was tempted to call to him; then checking the impulse, she went on to the staircase, which she ascended with difficulty because George’s legs seemed to give way when he tried to lift them to a step.  At last, after what she felt to be an eternity, they reached the upper floor, and she pushed her burden into Archibald’s room, where he fell like a log on the hearthrug.  The sound of his fall shook the house, and when Miss Polly came running in, with a cry of alarm, Gabriella almost expected to see O’Hara behind her.  But O’Hara did not come, and before the seamstress could recover from the palpitations the shock had produced, George was on his feet again, and was staring blankly, as if fascinated, at the reflection of the electric light in the mirror.