The first glimmering of dawn was visible as he stepped off the piazza; the wind was blowing fiercely and the snow still falling.  He had not gone a hundred yards before he knew that the expedition was to be more difficult than he had imagined.  To make headway against the wind was a constant struggle, and he seemed to slip back in the snow at every step.  Still the natural obstinacy of his nature was aroused, and as his attention was more and more engaged with the endeavor to make his way, he had less time to think of the probable futility of his proceeding.

Long before he sighted the hut, he was wet to the waist, not only because he had been in half a dozen drifts, but because the snow had penetrated every crevice of his clothing.

The hut was a forlorn little spot upon the landscape, a patch of grey on the stretch of forest and snow.  A shutter blowing in the wind gave an impression of desertion, for how could any one, however wretched, sit idle under that recurrent bang?

Drawing his revolver, Geoffrey approached the door.  He had no intention of giving a possible enemy an opportunity to prepare himself, and so did not knock, but, putting his shoulder against the door, shoved mightily.  The hinges broke from the rotten wood at once, and he stumbled in.

The pale light of the early winter morning showed a depressing interior, for the window was not the only opening.  There was a great gap in the roof where, earlier in the night, the chimney had fallen, and now its bricks littered the floor, already well covered with snow.  Some attempt must have been made, as McVay had boasted, of “fixing it up”; there were books in the shelves on the walls, and a black iron stove on which the snow now lay fearlessly.  As Geoffrey took in the situation, something in a huge chair, which he had taken for a heap of rugs, stirred and moved, and finally rose, betraying itself to be a woman.  Geoffrey had been prepared to find a den of thieves, or nothing at all, or even a girl, as McVay had said.  He told himself he would be surprised at nothing, yet found himself astounded, overwhelmed at the sight of a beautiful face.

The girl must have been beautiful so to triumph over her surroundings, for all sorts of strange garments were huddled about her, and over all a silk coverlet originally tied like a shawl under her chin, had slipped sideways, and fell like a Hussar’s jacket from one shoulder.  Her hair stood like a dark halo about her little face, making it seem smaller and younger, almost too small for the magnificent eyes that lit it.  Geoffrey, tolerably well versed in feminine attractions, said to himself that he had never seen such blue eyes.

And suddenly while he looked at her and her desperate plight, pity became in him a sort of fury of protection, the awakening of the masculine instinct toward beauty in distress.  It was a feeling that the other women he had admired—­well-fed, well-clothed, well-cared-for young creatures—­had always signally failed to arouse.  He had seen it in other men, had seen their hearts wrung because an able-bodied girl must take a trolley car instead of her father’s carriage, but he had thought himself hard, perhaps, unchivalrous; but now he knew better.  Now he knew what it was to feel personally outraged at a woman’s discomfort.