“This is something awful for you,” he said, when they had covered half the distance to the nearest pasture wall.  “Does the necessity warrant it?”

“It does,” she rejoined; and they pressed on in awe-inspired silence to the gate which opened on the pasture grove.

The quarter of a mile intervening between the gate and that side of the inclosure bounded by the lower slope of the mountain was truly a passage perilous.  A dozen times in the crossing Ardea fell, and so far from being able to save her, Morelock could do no more than fall with her.  Once a great limb of a spreading oak split off with a clashing of ice and came sweeping down to give them the narrowest of escapes; and after that they kept the open where they might.

At a rude rock stile over the limestone boundary wall at the mountain’s foot they paused to take breath.

“Is there much more of it?” asked the escort, regretting for the first time in his life, perhaps, that he had so studiously ignored the athletic side of his seminary training.

“The distance is nothing,” she panted.  “But we must take the path for a little way up the mountain.  No, don’t tell me it can’t be done; it must be done,”—­this in answer to his dubious scanning of the glassy ascent.

Again his good breeding asserted itself.

“Certainly it can be done, if you so desire.”  And he picked up a stone and patiently hammered the ice from the steps of the stile so she could cross in safety.

It was no more than a three-hundred-yard dash up the slope to the dog-keeper’s cabin in the little glen, but it was a fight for inches.  Every stone, every hand-hold of bush or shrub or tuft of dried grass was an icy treachery.  Ardea knew the mountain and the path, and was less helpless than she would otherwise have been; yet she was willing to confess that she could never have done it alone.  With all their care and caution they were exhausted and breathless when they topped the acclivity and Morelock saw the cabin in the pocket cove, with the great tulip-tree in the dooryard bending and distorted and groaning like a living thing in agony.

“Isn’t it terrible!” he said; but Ardea’s glance had gone beyond the tortured tree to the shuttered windows and smokeless chimney of the cabin.

“Oh, let us hurry!” she gasped; but at the gate of the tiny dooryard she stopped in sudden embarrassment.  “I can’t take you into the house, Mr. Morelock.  Will you wait for me here—­just a moment?”

He said “Certainly,” as he had been saying it from the first.  But it was quite without prejudice to a healthy and growing curiosity.  The small adventure was taking on an air of mystery which thickened momently, demanding insistently a complete rearrangement of his preconceived notions of Miss Ardea Dabney.

She left him at once and made her way cautiously to the ice-encrusted door-stone.  What she saw, when she lifted the wooden latch and entered, was what she had been praying she might not see.