“It is never too cold or too anything to rain here,” she said; and she let him take her arm to help her up the slippery stone steps to the stately portico.

A moment later the hospitable door of the manor house yawned for them, and the warmth of the Major’s welcome, the light and glow of the crackling wood fires, and the solid comfort of surrounding stone walls soon banished the memory of the small struggle with the elements.

“Oh, my deah suh! you are not going back to town this mo’ning!” protested the warm-hearted Major Caspar, as the quartet was rising from the breakfast-table an hour later.  “Why, bless youh soul!  I wouldn’t think of letting you go from undeh my roof in such weatheh as this!  Tell him it’s his duty to stay, Ardea, my deah; persuade him that he’ll neveh have a betteh oppo’tunity to wrestle with the wickedest old sinner in Paradise Valley.”

Young Mr. Morelock objected, zealously at first, but less strenuously when Ardea drew the sash curtain and showed him the ice crust already an inch thick, coating tree trunk and twig, grass blade and graveled driveway.

“I doubt very much if the horses could keep their footing; and it is quite out of the question for you to walk to Gordonia,” she decided.  “We have the long-distance, and you can explain matters to Doctor Channing.”

The young man called up St. Michael’s rectory and explained first, and smoked companionably with the Major in the library afterward.  Further along, there was a one-sided discussion polemical, it being meat and drink to Major Caspar to ensnare a young theologian to his discomfiture in the unaxiomatic field of religion.  Ardea was in and out of the library frequently while the discussion was in progress, but she had little to say; indeed, there was scant room for a third when the Major was once well warmed to his favorite relaxation.  But Morelock remarked as he might, in the few breathing-spaces allowed him by his host, that Miss Dabney seemed restless and anxious about something, and that she spent much of the time at the windows watching the steady growth of the ice sheet.

After luncheon they all gathered in the deep-recessed window of the music-room which commanded a view of the groved pasture with its background of mountain slope and precipice.  The rain was still falling, and the temperature remained at the freezing-point, but the wind had gone down and the slow, measured swaying of the trees under the weight of the thickening armor of ice was portentous of disaster, if the weather conditions should continue unchanged.

But as yet the storm was only in the magnificent stage.  Far and near, the outdoor world was a world of cold, white crystal, gleaming pure and unsullied under the gray skies.  Even the blackened tree trunks had their shining panoply of silver; and from the eaves of the projecting window a fringe of huge icicles was lengthening drop by drop.

Miss Euphrasia thought of her roses, already in leaf, and refused to be enthusiastic over the supernal beauty of the crystalline stage settings.  Major Caspar was anxious about the pasturing stock, and was relieved when Japheth Pettigrass came in sight, leading a slipping, sliding cavalcade of terrified horses to shelter in the great stables.  The young clergyman’s thoughts were with the ill-housed poor of the South Tredegar parish; and Ardea’s—?