“Hmh!” said the lady, and spread a discarded newspaper upon the seat, and sat down.  “Thank you,” she added perfunctorily, and looked out of the window at what she could see of the storm.

The down train thundered in, just then, and with a squealing of brakes stopped so that its chair car blotted her dismal view of the close hillside.  Between the two trains the snow sifted continuously, coming out of the gray wall above, falling into the black shadows beneath.  Two or three bundled passengers with snow packed in the wrinkles of their clothing went down the aisle of the chair-car, looking for seats.

It was all very depressing, wearisome in the extreme.  The lady settled herself deeper into her furs and sighed.

She continued to sigh at intervals during the remainder of the trip.  The last and the heaviest sigh of all she heaved when she settled down to sleep in a hotel bedroom and thought miserably of a certain lovable, if somewhat headstrong, young man who was out somewhere in these terrible mountains in the storm, hiding away from the world and perhaps suffering cold and hunger.

Thoughts of that kind are not the best medicine for sleeplessness, and it was long after midnight before Mrs. Singleton Corey drifted insensibly from heartsick reflections into the inconsequent imaginings of dreams.  She did not dream about Jack, which was some comfort; instead, she dreamed that she was presiding over a meeting of her favorite club.

She awoke to the chill of an unheated room during a winter storm.  The quiet lulled her at first into the belief that it was yet very early, but sounds of clashing dishes in a pan somewhere in a room beneath her seemed to indicate breakfast.  She would have telephoned down for her breakfast to be served in her room, but there was no telephone or call bell in sight.  She therefore dressed shiveringly and groped through narrow hallways until she found the stairs.  The mournful whoo-ooing of the wind outside gripped at her heartstrings.  Jack was out somewhere in this, hiding in a cave.  She shivered again.

In the dining room, where two belated breakfasters hurried through their meal, Mrs. Singleton Corey tried to pull herself together; tried to shut out sentiment from her mind, that she might the better meet and handle practical emergencies.  It would not do, of course, to announce her motive in coming here.  She would have to find this Miss Humphrey first of all.  She unfolded her napkin, laid it across her lap and waited.

“They can’t do much till this storm lets up,” a man at the next table observed to his companion.  “Uh course, I s’pose they’ll make some kinda bluff at trying—­but believe me, these hills is no snap in a snowstorm, and don’t I know it!  I got caught out, once,—­and I like to of stayed out.  No, sir—­”

“How’s the trains, Barney?” the other called to a man who had just come in from the office.