“Take good care of that wife of yours; she is well worth it,” she said.

“I realize that more every day, Madam Chase.  I’ll take care of her—­with my life,” he said, soberly, close to her ear.  Then he bore Ellen away, both looking back with friendly eyes at the pair they left in the cottage, and wishing them well with all their warm hearts.

They had barely sailed when the first heavy snowfall of the season covered the world with a blanket of white, and this was the forerunner of almost continuous genuine winter weather.  No severe storms such as Ellen had prophesied assailed the region until the first of February, but then came such a one as deserved no other name than the modern term of blizzard, a happening of which Madam Ruston and Charlotte had heard, but had never genuinely experienced.

“We’re going to show you the real article this time,” declared James Macauley, stamping his way in out of the snow one evening, when the storm had been in progress for twenty-four hours without intermission.  “I came over to assure you that if in the morning your roof has disappeared under a drift you may rest easy in the knowledge that you will surely be shovelled out before noon.  My wife sent me over to find out if you had plenty of supplies on hand.”

“We weren’t provided for quite so long a siege, but I was coming over to telephone from your house this morning.  It’s a great storm, isn’t it?  I think it’s fun, for it’s my first experience.  Do tell your boys to come over and make a snow fort or something in my front yard.”

“They’ll be delighted, when the storm stops.  There’s no use making forts now, you know.”

“No, I didn’t know.  I was prepared to go out this morning and play with them.”

Macauley looked at her.  “Not in that dress, I hope,” he observed, bluntly.  “It beats me, the way women wear their thinnest clothes in the coldest weather.  I wonder how I’d feel with the kind of rig you’re wearing.  And it’s none too warm here, it strikes me, if you don’t mind my saying it, in spite of that good-looking fire.”

“The room warms rather slowly in this extreme weather,” Charlotte admitted.  She was standing close to the fire, in the unquestionably summerlike dress of the blue cotton she chose for all her working frocks.  With its low rolling collar and short sleeves it certainly did not suggest comfort.  If Macauley had suspected that beneath it was no compensating protection, he would have been considerably more concerned than he was.  His wife was accustomed to explain to him, when he criticised the inadequacy of her attire, that she fully made up for it by some extra, hidden warmth of clothing.  And when he complained that anyhow she didn’t look warm she invariably replied that nothing could be more deceiving than looks.

He walked over to the windows.  They were rattling stormily with each gust of the tempest raging outside, and as he held his hand at their edges he could feel all the winds of heaven raging in.